And the truth in this case is called systemic voter discrimination.
AP -- Iraqi Leader Says Thousands Couldn't Vote
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's interim president said Tuesday that tens of thousands of people may have been unable to vote in the country's historic weekend election because some polling places - including those in Sunni Arab areas - ran out of ballots.This report from al-Jazeera gives a breakdown of numbers for the areas in which Sunnis were not allowed to vote, due to "ballot shortages".
Jibouri said ballot sheets were 36,000-40,000 short in Hawija, a largely Sunni Arab area southwest of oil-rich Kirkuk.And from the New York Times:
He estimated a shortfall of 28,000 ballot papers in Baiji, a northern Sunni city, and 6,000 in nearby Shirqat.
In northern Iraq, protests have repeatedly broken out over the last few days in several cities where officials claim that hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of them Kurdish Christians, were not able to vote because balloting materials arrived inexplicably late.Here's a message to the fundies: what sayest thou regarding all this? Your own brethren were stopped from voting!
A huge crowd of Shiite Muslims returning to southern Iraq from the hajj, their holy pilgrimage to Mecca, said Monday that they and hundreds of others like them had been deliberately kept from coming back to their country in time to vote. "They have wasted our votes," said Jaleel Harran, 41, a pilgrim from the southern city of Nasiriya.
There are also claims that election workers bent the rules to allow unregistered citizens to cast ballots, and one charge that a political party was improperly left off the ballots.
Now for some quick math.
36,000 (Hawija) + 28,000 (Baiji) + 6,0000 (Shirqat) + 100,000 (Kurdish Northern Iraq) = 170,000.
170,000 discriminated voters + X failures to get given Iraqi parties on the ballots = 1 hell of a botched election without even 1 excuse, for X greater than or equal to 1.
