Monday, April 26, 2010
Iraq court makes first move to fix election
Because you just knew the fix was in when Maliki of Iraq refused to accept votes as cast by the purple finger people.
A special electoral court in Iraq disqualified a winning candidate in last month’s election on charges he once was a member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, two officials said Monday. The decision was the first concrete move to change the preliminary results of the vote that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition narrowly lost.A fix both clever and clumsy. If the recalculated votes don't deliver the election to the right people then they will just have to throw out enough of the "wrong" winners to deliver an acceptable outcome.
The court’s ruling intensified a political crisis that remains far from resolved, raising tensions and even the specter of violence. The court’s decision, at a minimum, will delay the formation of a new government through the months when the Obama administration has pledged to withdraw its combat troops, leaving a force of only 50,000 after September.
The disqualified candidate won a seat in the new 325-member Parliament on a slate led by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who served as interim prime minister after the American invasion in 2003, the officials said.
The court, however, also disqualified 51 losing candidates, and the votes they received will be discarded, requiring a recalculation of the winners — and losers — across the ballot, the officials said.
The director of the commission charged with purging former Baath loyalists also disclosed that he had asked the court to bar nine additional winning candidates, though the court has yet to rule on that. That would clearly change the outcome since all of the candidates belong to Mr. Allawi’s winning coalition, which had edged out Mr. Maliki’s bloc by two seats, 91 to 89.
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