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/
Well, I obviously have too much time on my hands...
Using the guidelines provided by the Iraq website, I crunched the numbers and came up with the following seat allocation (using the election data up now as if it were finalized)... in any case, this is probably a really good estimate of how the regional seats will be distributed....
Of 230 seats distributed among the provinces:
United Iraqi Coalition (religious shiite, Sistani, Sadr, Jafari et al): 109 seats
Iraq List (secular shiite, Allawi et al): 21
Kurds: 47
Kurdish Gathering: 43
Islamic Union of Kurdistan: 4
Sunnis: 44
Tawafoq Iraq Front (sunni): 35
Hewar Iraq Front (sunni): 9
Progressives:2
Peace and Reconciliation: 3
Others: 3
Since I didn't tally up the grand totals for each party nationwide and I don't quite know how the at-large seats are distributed, I didn't even try to calculate those.
Iraq has a very strange PR electoral system within each province. Whereas in other countries where there are lots of third parties, the seats are distributed among the top vote getters by the percentage of the seated-party vote, in Iraq, the extra seats are distributed to parties with the "largest remainders," a procedure that allows small parties to have greater representation.
In any case, it looks like the religious shiite party will be just short of a majority based on the provincial tally. Their success in the at-large vote may be greater, though, because of the better turn-out in shiite regions than in still tumultuous sunni areas... though, of course, sunni turn-out was much higher than last time.
I must say, though, that the Iraqi electoral system has been carefully designed to try to bring some ethnic balance to Iraq. That appears to have happened... its just that the secular faction within shiite has proved weaker than expected.
