(To anyone who has followed my few journal entries, let me first apologize for having a serious one that is not intended to piss people off. I'll be back in true form before you know it)
Second of all, I apologize if this has been addressed elsewhere. I haven't seen it, but I'll admit that I haven't searched particularly hard. Perhaps it's one of those things everyone else already knew and brushed off, but it struck me as weird. Found via http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/ , which is most definitely slanted to the left. Some may remember the old blog dearraed.com, written by Salam Pax. There was at the time a lot of speculation on whether the guy was legit or not. Anyway, Raed was a person who occasionally put his opinion on that site, now has his own blog. Here's something he recently wrote:
I talked briefly to one of my friends in Baghdad working with the UN, and he was furious about the latest "definitions" of the word "voter" by the lame Iraqi parliament.
The parliament decided to identify "voter" in two different ways to make it mathematically almost impossible to reject the destructive US-supported constitution.
In the new definitions, if a governorate of 1,500,001 adults who can vote had one million of them actually going to the election polls, and all of the one million saying NO, their voices won't count as a NO, so their governorate will be a YES governorate because rejecting the constitution in one governorate requires a NO from more than two thirds of the governorate registered voters (i.e. all eligible voters in the governorate: all adults who - "used to" - recieve the monthly food rations).
In the same governorate of the 1,500,001 adults, if 10 people went to vote and five of them said YES, their entire governorate will be considered as a YES governorate, because accepting the constitution in a governorate requires a YEs from half of the actual voters (i.e. people who actually go to vote regardless of their ratio to the total number of eligable voters)
What kind of elections is this?
why don't they only put a YES option and make it easier?
Could that possibly be true? Could they essentially be counting all registered voters as a "YES" by default unless they show up to vote "NO"? If that is indeed the case, how could the constitution possibly be voted down?
Is this the kind of thing we can routinely expect from a Republican administration calling the shots? I think many of us were willing to accept 2000 as a fluke, a disgrace and a shame but still something that was understandable. I know a lot of us seriously question the 2004 Presidential election as well, since the numbers that turned up were so far off from the exit polls (plus the fact that Diebold who made the voting machines promised to give Dubya Ohio.)
But this just seems a bit too much. Even if there are people that legitimately believe we are trying to export Democracy to these people, is this the way to do it? Rigged elections?
Anyway, hopefully someone can tell me that Raed is mistaken.