Surprise meter at high
Carina Perelli, a senior United Nations elections official, said the organization’s team had decided to hold elections based on a system of proportional representation, whereby voters across the country would choose a list of candidates, ordinarily supported by political parties. The number of votes tallied by a party nationwide would determine how many of its candidates who appeared on the list would take office. Under the system, the percentage of votes received by a particular party would roughly equal the percentage of seats they would be awarded in the national assembly. Ms. Perelli said United Nations officials and the Iraqis with whom they consulted favored a proportional system, in part because that system tends to award seats to smaller parties, which a system of district elections would not.
Ms. Perelli said the job of setting up districts would be difficult to do quickly. The election commission announced today, and made up of eight Iraqis, is empowered to draw up a list of voters and to set up the vast infrastructure, thought to require at least 20,000 polling places, for the elections. They would also have the power to postpone the elections, across the country or in parts, if they decided that the level of violence would not allow the elections to go forward. But Ms. Perelli said she was optimistic that elections could go forward here, even amid guerrilla insurgency and terrorist attacks. To illustrate, she listed several war-ravaged countries where the United Nations had either helped set up elections or was currently trying to do so: Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Liberia. "We have conducted elections in areas with rampant levels of violence," she said.
Optimism? From the UN? About achieving America’s goal? I would have expected gloom and despair, excuses, and predictions of failure. Good news indeed. Can’t let the terrorists derail the elections--they can’t be given that power. |