Iraqi election results

[Mr. Morden]

There are *no* other threads here about the Iraqi election?  Weird.  Anyway, obviously the official results won't be out for a while, but there are various rumors out there.  Iraqi blogger Omar of "Iraq the Model" commented on what he expects to see in the results:

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2005/12/on-way-to-new-government.html

"However, partial results can still give an idea of how many seats each of the major lists is going to get and by combining the various estimates coming from different regions it looks like that the UIA is till going to be the biggest bloc in the parliament while the second largest bloc will most likely be the National Accord Front followed by the Kurds and Allawi’s block 3rd and 4th respectively with the difference between seat-totals for the latter three expected to be rather small.
However it’s possible that the latter three will swap places. Again with little differences."

I'd have to say that it does seem odd that the National Accord Front, a Sunni Arab party, might actually beat out the Kurds for second place.  It would suggest that the Sunni Arabs (who comprise about the same share of the total population as the Kurds) are just as united behind the National Accord Front as the Kurds are behind the Kurdistan Alliance.

[Mr. Morden]

Hmmm.....this doesn't seem to be getting all that much play in the American or international media, though this would seem to be a pretty big story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4545148.stm

In short, there have been some preliminary numbers released by Iraq's electoral commission, and they indicate a very strong showing by the United Iraqi Alliance (the big Shiite religous group that holds most of the power in the current government).  In the January election, the UIA got ~50% of the vote nationwide, about twice as much as the next closest party.  Before this election, most people were expecting that they'd still end up as the largest group, but not by nearly as wide a margin, for a variety of reasons (very few Sunnis voted last time, so more Sunni votes this time would chip away at the UIA's share of the vote; also, Moqtada al Sadr joined up with the UIA, and several of the more moderate parts of the coalition broke away and joined up with Allawi's secular list or ran on their own, making the new UIA more extreme than the one that ran last January).

Anyway, it looks like the preliminary numbers suggest that the UIA's share of the vote has gone down very little from last January.  89% of the votes have been counted in Baghdad (the largest province), and the UIA has 58% of the votes there.  The Accord Front (largest Sunni party) is second with 19% and Allawi's party is third with 14%.  (Again, this is only Baghdad.)  In January, the results in Baghdad were UIA 61%, Allawi 25%, and the rest going to a smattering of smaller parties.  So really, not much of a dip for the UIA.

The Sunnis are now accusing the electoral commission of corruption--saying that the vote count has been rigged to benefit the UIA.  Pro-democracy/pro-secular Iraqi bloggers Iraq the Model and Iraqi Vote have more details and background here:

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2005/12/whos-playing-with-fire.html

http://iraqivote.blogspot.com/