The Sunni lists, along with ex-PM Iyad Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list and others, have joined together to contest the results of the December 15 election in order, at the least, to have the results reviewed and their complaints addressed. At the most, some members of this new coalition have called for new elections altogether.

BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 22, 2005 ???????? Dozens of Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups threatened to boycott Iraq’s new legislature Thursday if complaints about tainted voting are not reviewed by an international body.

A representative for former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi described the Dec. 15 vote as “fraudulent” and the elected lawmakers “illegitimate.”

A joint statement issued by 35 political groups that competed in last week’s elections said the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, which oversaw the ballot, should be disbanded.

It also said the more than 1,250 complaints about fraud, ballot box stuffing and intimidation should be reviewed by international organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference or the Arab League.

There was no one available for comment at the U.N. office in Baghdad, but a world body spokesman in New York rejected a review.

The name of this new grouping is Maram. According to this report, they are calling on the Electoral Commission to be disbanded and replaced by an alternative. If their demands are not met, they will boycott the new parliament and call for nationwide peaceful protests to call for new elections. It seems that they’re taking a cue from Ukraine and Lebanon on this front.

It remains to be seen what happens after this. The January 30 elections saw promises of revolt but nothing materialized. This time, however, there is much more support behind the cause. The ruling religious Shia UIA is defiant toward the demands, saying that they are simply sore losers and should respect the demands of the majority.

Well, that would be fine and dandy if there weren’t something seriously fishy about the results, as no polling or analysis before the election showed the UIA doing as well as it did, or the Sunni and secular parties doing as poorly as they did. In fact, the UIA was supposed to drop by nearly half, while Allawi was supposed to do as well as double. What gives?

Let’s take a look at some of the complaints of fraud, and see if there is something of an information lapse with regards to what actually happened and who was speaking to the press:

– 200,000 suspicious names got added to the voter rolls in the disputed city of Kirkuk just days before the election, allowing the Kurds to get over the 50% + 1 votes necessary to join the city with the Kurdish region to the north. This action was taken by the Electoral Commission that is now in dispute. They had previously made the decision that only voters registered in the city, exactly as the law says (I read the regulations), could vote, but just before the election it decided that anyone with an ID could vote. Because of this corrupt and possibly illegal decision, Kurdish voters flocked in from the north in buses to make sure that oil-rich Kirkuk became part of their region.

– According to this report, Turkmen names were taken off voters rolls in Kirkuk. Also, the media was only allowed near two polling centers out of 267 and three monitors were on hand. One man was caught voting four times, and it is not apparent how many people were able to do this.

– Omar catches the Election Commission in an error of blatant number fixing… “Lawyer Abdulwahid al-Lami is from the Lami tribe, the biggest in a province that is run by tribal relations. This candidate won 5 votes, yes 5 votes!
This means this man didn????????t even get the votes of his own family???????it doesn????????t make sense. It is as if the man paid 1 million dinar for each vote since the registration fee for candidacy is 5 million dinars. Heh.” Ä…Å “-Sheikh Raheem al-Sa????????idi was also running from Maysan and he????????s a local sheikh of a big tribe that has many thousands of members in the south. This sheikh won 17 votes only! A usual sheikh is married to at least 3 wives and has dozens of children, brothers and cousins and this one won 17 votes only!” The south, as you may recall, is dominated by the UIA-linked Badr Corp militia.

– According to the Mail & Guardian, “Allegations of fraud were already being made before results were announced. By Sunday, more than 1 000 witness statements of violations had been sent to the election commission. They ranged from claims of ballot stuffing to the involvement of police and others security officials in partisan campaigning.” This mostly happened in Shia-dominated parts of the country. This includes the south, where the Badr Corp is effectively in control, and Sadr City, Najaf, Karbala, and elsewhere where Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia draws a curtain to the outside world. The eyewitness reports show policeman and militiamen preventing people from voting, and then taking the ballot boxes behind closed doors and stuffing them before delivery.

– There are further reports that in Sadr City, voters were allowed to vote up to ten times. It’s not like there’s any oversight there, or anything. Sadr’s list joined the UIA for this election. It’s not wonder that the results were so heavily skewed in its favor in Baghdad. Dr. Ayad Sameraii from the Iraqi National Dialogue Front was on Al Arabia television mentioned this, and further said that “more than a hundred thousand of his slate’s supporters were denied admission to polling stations to cast their ballots. In Ghazaliya, the National Guards continuously fired shots into the air to disperse voters before they had a chance to vote. ”

– Allawi’s list, in the article linked above, lists his main complaints as, “supporters of the United Iraqi Alliance stormed polling stations to cast multiple ballots. Mr. Allawi????????s allies have criticized the electoral commission????????s decision to announce results so early, and have questioned whether the commission has the independence to stand up to powerful political parties.” The results were not supposed to be finished counting for up to two weeks. By announcing their count early, the Commission must have hoped to head off any complaints early. Instead, their legitimacy is being questioned, while the independence of the Commission itself is being questioned. No doubt, the penetration of the UIA and Sadr linked militias into the police forces, government (especially the Interior Ministry), and the Commission itself, not to mention the outright fear people have of them, likely had a large impact on the decision to skew the results.

– The media reported that so many Sunnis voted that election materials, such important things as ballots and ballot boxes themselves, were simply in short supply! Eleven out of 35 polling stations did not receive enough ballot boxes, several did not open, and many others ran out of ballots by early morning because of this. Come to find out, in key Sunni areas such as Fallujah, the Electoral Commission somehow forgot to deliver them. “‘Some sites ran out of ballots in the early hours of the morning,’ he said, adding that Iraq’s independent electoral commission was responsible for not having provided enough materials.” This was not just limited to Fallujah.

– The news also reported that voters were being helped out by being bussed to polling stations. Aww! While this is true in some circumstances, in others it was used to allow voters to cast multiple ballots at multiple polling stations (such as in the case of Kirkuk, above). There were over 30,000 polling stations throughout the country, making most every trip to a polling station within short walking distance.

This is all points in one direction. The Commission is heavily influenced by the ruling government and its supporters systematically committed fraud during and after the elections. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, as I warned about this on election day. What is actually surprising is that people are just brushing this off and calling the detractors “sore losers,” effectively letting the government get away with it. Remember, it’s not just the Sunnis anymore. It’s basically everyone who didn’t vote for the Kurds or UIA, including the secularists and liberals.

But we can’t afford to let them get away with it. If we want the experiment of Iraqi democracy to work, the new parliament needs to be legitimate. The people have to believe that the government isn’t corrupt and that their votes will be counted correctly. It is for this reason that the U.S. and UN need to stop their head-nodding that’s being done in hopes that the “sore losers” will withdraw their complaints and election day will escape untarnished. It won’t happen. If they don’t acknowledge what happened, and find a way to solve this, the political crisis will only deepen. Maram is gaining momentum and support by the day. Let’s hope something works out soon. If that requires a redo election in Baghdad, which appears to have had the worst violations, then so be it.

UPDATE: Keeping their word, the first round of protests have begun in Baghdad and elsewhere around the country. According to this report, around 20,000 in Baghdad. This is preliminary, and the longer this crisis drags on, the larger and more well-organized they’ll be. So far the call today just came from the Sunni groups, but I would expect that to expand to the other members of Maram soon enough. UPDATE: Make that a few hundred thousand.

Mohammed has more, in a very important post describing all of this. He says that the demonstration took place in Baghdad’s largest street and filled it for kilometers on end, probably being more than 20,000 people. Check out the video of it here.

He also notes that senior election commission official Farid Ayar has submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Jafari. Reason? ???????Time has changed and so did the principles and ethics that used to govern our work.” Wow. I agree with Mohammed completely: this is the beginning of the unraveling of this scandal.

The good news is that, so far, there has been no bloodshed. If this is resolved and that trend continues, it will actually speak volumes about the progress that has been made over the past few years, both in terms of the strength of the nation’s political culture and the will of the people to see a functioning democracy.