Word: turnout
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...face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the Iraqi elections transpired this past Sunday with relative success. Insurgent violence was moderate, as compared to some of the most pessimistic prognoses, and Iraqi turnout was certainly respectable. In a country that has been several times treated to the pathetic theater of sham elections—Saddam Hussein was famously “elected” with over 99 percent of the vote in 1995 and 2002—the recent success of a democratic Iraqi election is a welcome sign of hope in the troubled country. We are thus excited that the Iraqi...
...claimed by President Bush as Exhibit A in his global mission to spread freedom. "Today, the people of Iraq have spoken to the world, and the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East," the President said Sunday, greeting news reports that voter turnout had been greater than expected. Expectations, of course, had been gloomy, as the raging insurgency had effectively precluded most campaign activity, and voters on Sunday went into ballot booths to select from parties and coalitions whose candidates had, for the most part, been kept a secret...
...Once the dust settled, in fact, the Iraqi Electoral Commission's initial estimate of a 72 percent turnout was revised down to 57 percent of eligible voters - later around 60 percent - with the ethnic breakdown as expected: Strong voter turnout among the long-marginalized Shiites and Kurds, who together comprise over 80 percent of the population; poor turnout among the Sunni Arabs in whose name the insurgency fights. Still, the very fact of Iraq's next government being chosen at the ballot box entrenches the principle that no government can claim legitimacy in Iraq without a democratic popular mandate. There...
...constituency but also from Shiites wary of giving clerics political authority. Allawi may have been helped by what appears to have been a de facto boycott by supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, on whose votes the UIA may have been counting. Indeed, if the 57 percent turnout figure is accurate, then the high Kurdish turnout and the fact that there was a substantial if small vote among Sunnis would suggest that a significant number of Shiites stayed away. UIA leaders remain confident, however, that they'd carried a comfortable majority among the Shiites...
...would almost certainly have been considerably higher had not banning all vehicles from the roads prevented car bombings. But the insurgents are almost certain to redouble their efforts in the coming weeks, as if to show that the election hasn't altered the strategic reality. And as long as turnout out in Sunni areas was low and the community questions the legitimacy of its outcome, they'll have achieved their basic strategic objective for the campaign season...