'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

UIA at around 50%

So finally, two whole weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, we have preliminary results of the Jan 30 election.

That story, from AP, gave only the (preliminary) totals for the three biggest blocs that ran. Another AP story, to which I can't find a link, said the total number of votes cast came to 8.456 million.

So if you take the (preliminary) numbers listed for the three biggie lists, then you find that, of the ballots cast:

the Sistanist, UIA list got 48.2%,

the Kurdish list got 25.7%, and

Allawi's list got 13.8%.

Of course, the final percentages should be a little higher than this, in each case, once we know how many of the "ballots cast" were judged to be "invalid".

[Update, Sun. mid-afternoon, NYC time: I just learned here that the 8.456 million figure is the figure for valid votes cast, so those percentages there HOLD. Also, the number of votes required to win one seat in the Assembly is about 30,750. Down at the bottom of this, I'll try to give my estimates for seat numbers.]

Interesting how tantalizingly close to 50% the UIA list got. I should imagine that if they can make a decent working coalition with pro-Moqtada or other small Shiite parties, they would come in at over 50%, giving them the kind of strong electoral victory that I'm sure Sistani was looking for.

Lots of politics over the days ahead, no doubt. For starters, the IEC isn't going to announce "verified" final results for another three days, after it has sorted out all outstanding challenges.

And then, there's the politics of coalition building. Allawi was described in this Hayat story as offering PUK leader Jalal Talabani the presidency if he would enter a coalition with him. The WaPo today had a story about Ahmad Chalabi, who's a little low down on the UIA list, desperately wooing Moqtada.

The big question remains. That is,how can the next administration (whoever ends up heading it: I'm kind of expecting Ibrahim Jaafari) win broad enough legitimacy both for itself, and for the constitution-writing process that desperately needs to get underway?

I'd say, legitimacy-wise, that whoever heads the new (still interim) administration needs to find a credible way to be able to draw in significant representatives of the Sunni community, as well as of major different strands of the Shiite community. It goes without saying that the Kurds, who are very well organized at the political level, also have to be-- and will be-- inside the tent.

An attempt to form a Shiite-Kurdish coalition to the exclusion of the Sunnis can't work.

Okay, here, added in mid-afternoon Sunday, New York time, are the votes and rough seat counts (out of 275 seats), as taken from this AP story:

The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite alliance backed by Shiite Muslim clergy): 4,075,295 ( = 132 seats)

The Kurdistan Alliance (coalition of two main Kurdish factions): 2,175,551 (= 70 seats)

The Iraqi List (headed by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi): 1,168,943 ( = 38 seats)

Iraqis (headed by interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer): 150,680 ( = 4 seats; 4.9 actually)

The Turkomen Iraqi Front (represents the countries ethnic Turks): 93,480 ( = 3 seats)

National Independent Elites and Cadres Party: 69,938 ( = 2 seats)

The Communist Party: 69,920 ( = 2 seats)

The Islamic Kurdish Society: 60,592 ( = 1 seat; 1.9 actually)

The Islamic Labor Movement in Iraq: 43,205 ( = 1 seat)

The National Democratic Alliance: 36,795 ( = 1 seat)

National Rafidain List (Assyrian Christians): 36,255 ( = 1 seat)

The Reconciliation and Liberation Entity: 30,796 ( = 1 seat)

Iraqi Islamic Party (main Sunni group headed by Mohsen Abdel-Hamid): 21,342 ( < 1 seat)

Assembly of Independent Democrats (headed by Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi): 12,728 ( < 1 seat)

National Democratic Party (headed by Naseer Kamel al-Chaderchi, Sunni lawyer and member of the former Iraqi Governing Council): 1,603 ( considerably less than 1 seat)

That only amounts to 256 seats. And the total of all those votes listed comes to more than 480,000 less than the 8.456 million valid votes that the Commission reported.

Where did those other 480,000 votes go? That's not a small number. Some of them might, of course, have gone to the numerous much smaller lists also on the ballot paper. But are some of them votes whose validity the Commission is still considering?

Actually, the way the AP story reported the global vote tally was this:

Total votes: 8,550,571

Invalid votes: 94,305

So they are notably not telling us that the 8.456 million votes (= roughly the difference between those two numbers; actually 8,456, 266) are all valid. There are just telling us that 94,305 were not valid.

I guess we need to keep watching the story.

There is also, of course, the numerically smaller story of what the rules are for aggregating the votes that didn't go into constituing a "whole seat". But that should have been pre-decreed in the IEC's voting rules and clearly calculable.