Those Diebold Machines Were Sort of Suspicious…

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This doesn’t seem like good news:

Iraqi election officials said today that they were investigating what they described as “unusually high” vote totals in 12 Shiite and Kurdish provinces, where as many 99 percent of the voters were reported to have cast ballots in favor of Iraq’s new constitution, raising the possibility that the results of Saturday’s referendum could be called into question.

Unsaid in the piece, but still one of the bigger problems in Iraq, is the fact that many Sunnis believe that they comprise much, much more than 15-20 percent of the population. As a result, any electoral loss will likely be viewed with suspicion, conspiracy theories will abound, and even in a clean election it will be very hard to convince Sunnis that the Americans didn’t rig the vote against them. News like this (or this) certainly doesn’t help.