3-30-05, 9:24 am
As controversy and in-fighting over naming various officials in the new National Assembly continue to slow the process toward writing and adopting a permanent constitution for Iraq, another controversy hidden below the flash bulbs and triumphs in the Janaury 30th election is still being sorted out.
A UN review mission completed last week questioned the competitiveness of the election, the absence of regulations on the sources of campaign funds or caps on spending, and the transparency or accountability of spending campaign resources.
Concerned election experts at the UN also pointed out that most of the 7,000 candidates had no means or time to publicize their platforms or becomes familiar to the voters. Social issues such as massive unemployment, security, and the atittudes about the US-led occupation were not at the forefront of the dominant campaigns.
Fareed Ayar, spokesman for the Supreme Electoral Commission of Iraq, told Chinese news agency Xinhua that he and other Iraqi election officials participated in these meetings with UN election epxerts to discuss concerns about the elections.
Ayar said there were points of weakness in the legal framework on which the electoral campaign was based, and that questions and complaints raised about the fairness of the process had legitimacy.
A major concern that the Iraq's election commission stipulated to was that there were no regulations to control the sources of the financial support of the candidates or to set the top spending budget for an electoral campaign, Ayaer admitted.
'Bad security conditions,' prevented 'the candidates [from] freely express[ing] their opinions and suggestions or that the voters can build their choices on knowledge,' the election official added.
He said that security issues had forced campaigns to postpone their activities until late in the process, and the three-day period set by the commission to review the complaints after the polls was not really enough.
Questions of media bias were not examined under this review process.
Overall, the UN's election assistance department concluded that irregularities were relatively few and were pleased with the process. More severe critics of Iraq's election process raised numerous questions and complaints that some voters were misled to choose a certain list or others were unable to go to voting centers due to threats from other parties.
Other irregularities reported during Iraq's Janaury 30th election by Tammuz Network for Election Monitoring - Iraq, a non-governmental organization that focuses on monitoring elections, were also not directly dealt with by the UN review.
Among the complaints were that at some polling places in Baghdad and Bakuba, campaigners with the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of parties and organizations closely affiliated with Ayatollah al-Sistani, which eventually won about 48 percent of the vote, provided their voters with several election cards rather than one. Some polling places were controlled by people affiliated with al-Sistani's group who were caught voting multiple times for their candidates.
At other polling sites in Kut, monitors said that supporters of al-Sistani's list used excessive electioneering near polling places including guiding voters on which list to vote for. Also in that town, a loudspeaker at a mosque urged voers to vote for al-Sistani's party.
At other places in the area, witnessed accused members of Iraq's national police force of supporting another party associated with former interim Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi and asking voters waiting in line who they planned to vote for.
In the Shatra district of Nasseriya, monitors reported an armed group forcing voters to cast their votes for al-Sistani's party.
In Arbil and Basrah, witnesses reported that some voters used moisturizer creams to remove the ink stain put on voters' index fingers to prevent them from voting more than once. Ballot boxes at at least on epolling site in Basrah contained marked ballots that had been inserted prior to the site being opened.
