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.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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