Iraqi Constitution Passes
Good news. It squeaked by though, which isn’t too much of a surprize that the Sunnis weren’t happy with it (and have many legitimate reasons not to be happy with it), but at least they voted. That’s key. The article also says they are organizing politically for the December elections so they can seek constitutional amendments early next year. More power to them.
Seventy-nine percent of voters approved the constitution in the nationwide referendum held on Oct. 15, the officials said. But because of the specifics of the electoral law and a strong effort by Sunni Arab voters in some provinces, the document only narrowly passed in the end, to the surprise of Iraqi and American officials.
The overall vote was sharply divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The biggest support came from Shiites and Kurds, who make up about 80 percent of the population, while Sunni Arabs largely rejected the document.
It seemed, until the final count was announced, that the Sunnis might have rallied enough votes to defeat the constitution in a three-province rejection. Under the electoral law, if two-thirds of voters in three provinces had turned down the constitution, then the document would not have passed. Officials said on Monday that two Sunni-dominated provinces had rejected the document; the results for a third province with a Sunni majority, Ninevah, were not released until today.
Officials said that after an audit of the tally for Ninevah, they had determined that 55 percent there had voted “no” on the constitution, only 11 points short of the two-thirds threshold. If 83,283 of the 322,869 people who had voted “yes” had voted “no” instead, then the constitution would have been defeated. In other words, as in the past two presidential elections in the United States, the vote in Iraq came down to a small group of voters in one particular area of the country.