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Final results from Iraq referendum delayed
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-19 08:49
Final results from Iraq's landmark referendum on a new constitution will
likely not be announced until Friday at the earliest because of delays getting
counts to the capital and a wide-ranging audit of an unexpectedly high number of
"yes" votes, election officials said.
The returns have raised questions over the possibility of irregularities in
the balloting. With the delays, the outcome of the crucial referendum will
remain up in the air possibly into next week, at a time when the government had
hoped to move public attention to a new milestone: the start of the trial of
ousted president Saddam Hussein on Wednesday.
Saddam and seven senior members of his government will go on trial in a
heavily secured Baghdad courtroom for a 1982 massacre of about 150 Shiites in
the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, insurgent attacks began to heat up again after being nearly silent
on referendum day Saturday, when polling stations were heavily protected across
the country.
A U.S. soldier was shot and killed in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad,
early Tuesday, the military said. In fighting in western Iraq, two U.S. Marines
and four militants were killed Monday near the town of Rutba, not far from the
Jordanian border, the military said. At least 1,979 members of the U.S. military
have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an
Associated Press count.
Gunmen killed the deputy governor of Anbar province, Talib Ibrahim, spraying
his car with automatic weapons fire in Ramadi and wounding two of his
bodyguards, police said. Anbar, the vast western Sunni region, is the main
battleground between insurgents and U.S.-Iraqi forces.
Militants killed at least nine Iraqis elsewhere Tuesday in shootings and a
mortar attack, including an adviser to the industry minister, one of the
country's top Sunni Arab officials, police said.
The handcuffed and mutilated bodies of six Shiites were pulled out of a pond
where they were dumped north of Baghdad, and three other bodies were discovered
elsewhere in the capital.
The audit, announced by the Electoral Commission on Monday, will examine
results that have raised eyebrows because they show an oddly high number of
"yes" votes — apparently including in two crucial provinces that could determine
the outcome of the vote, Ninevah and Diyala.
The election commission and United Nations officials supervising the counting
have made no mention of fraud and have cautioned that the unexpected votes are
not necessarily incorrect.
But Sunni Arab leaders who oppose the charter have claimed the vote was fixed
in Ninevah and Diyala and elsewhere to swing them to a "yes" after initial
results reported by provincial officials indicated the constitution had passed.
Both provinces are believed to have slight Sunni Arab majorities that likely
voted "no" in large numbers, along with significant Shiite and Kurdish
communities that largely cast "yes" ballots. But initial results from election
officials in Ninevah and Diyala indicated about 70 percent of voters supported
the charter and only 20 percent rejected.
Sunni opponents needed to win over either Diyala or Ninevah to veto the
constitution. Sunnis had to get a two-thirds "no" vote in any three of Iraq's 18
provinces to defeat the charter, and they appeared to have gotten it in Anbar
and Salahuddin, both heavily Sunni.
After a sandstorm that had closed Baghdad's airport cleared Tuesday, the
first bags full of sheets of vote counts from Iraq's provinces were flown into
the capital for tabulation from Anbar, Karbala and Babil provinces. All of
Baghdad's vote counts have also reached the central counting center.
But the head of the Electoral Commission, Ezzeddin Mohammed, said material
from 14 others were likely to be flown in on Wednesday. The 250 workers at
Baghdad's central counting center will then take two days to go through them to
produce a final count — meaning Friday.
But the audit could further delay matters, Mohammed said. The electoral
commission must send representatives along with U.N. officials to the concerned
provinces to carry out the review.
The counting process is a complicated one. Ballots are counted at the polling
stations, where officials fill out a results sheet for each ballot box. One copy
of the sheet remains at the station, another is sealed inside the ballot box,
which is sent to the provincial capital for storage. A third copy of the sheet
goes on to Baghdad, carried in transparent, sealed bags piled with other sheets.
At the central counting center in Baghdad, workers were cutting open the bags
and logging numbers from the results sheets into computers. The auditing teams
will go to the provinces to compare unusual results sheets with their other
copies, and open ballot boxes to count votes if necessary.
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