Time To Count The Votes
Election officials counted millions of paper ballots across Iraq on Sunday as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it appeared the country's draft constitution had passed despite a surprisingly large turnout by Sunni Arab opponents.
Rejection seemed more and more impossible. Ninevah, a crucial northern province that Sunni Arab opponents pushed hard to swing their way, appeared to have gone strongly for a "yes" vote.
According to a vote count from 260 of the provinces 300 polling stations, about 300,000 in Ninevah voted "yes" for the constitution, and only 80,000 voted "no," said Samira Mohammed, spokeswoman for the election commission in the province's capital, Mosul, and Abdul-Ghani Boutani, a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The two corrected earlier figures that had different figures but the same proportion of yes to no.
Ballots from seven polling stations in the province still had to be counted, but it would be impossible to turn the vote around to a two-thirds "no" Sunni opponents would need.
To defeat the constitution, Sunnis have to muster the two-thirds rejection vote in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces. They were likely to reach that threshold in the vast Sunni heartland of Anbar province in the west. Salahuddin province also looked possible, but with Ninevah out of the running, they would need to get the province of Diyala, which will also be difficult.
An elections official in Baghdad told The Associated Press that indications point to the charter having been approved. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the counting was still going on.
The large Sunni turnout made it possible that the vote would be close or even go the other way, and late Saturday it appeared at least two of a required three provinces might reject it by a wide margin.
Lt. Todd Wood told CBS News correspondent Lara Logan that at 75 percent, voter turnout in the Sunni heartland of Tikrit had exceeded their highest expectations.
"Once they were convinced that the security was there and it was a safe vote, then they started coming out in droves," Wood said.
Washington hopes the constitution will be approved so that Iraqis can form a legitimate, representative government, tame the insurgency and enable the 150,000 U.S. troops to begin to withdraw.
After polls opened at 7 a.m., whole families turned out at voting stations, with parents carrying young children, sometimes in holiday clothes. Men and women lined up by the hundreds in some places or kept up a constant traffic into heavily bunkered polls, dressed their best in suits and ties or neatly pressed veils, or in shorts and flip-flops, weary from the day's Ramadan fast.
"I'm 75 years old. Everything is finished for me. But I'm going to vote because I want a good future for my children," Said Ahmad Fliha said after walking up a hill with the help of a relative and a soldier to a polling site in Haditha, a western Sunni town.
Some nine million Iraqis cast ballots, election officials said, announcing a preliminary turnout estimate of 61 percent.
CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that despite how well the day went, the grim reality is that the democratic process has brought few tangible improvements to the Iraqi people's lives. Throughout the day the voting and counting had to be done without benefit of electricity because the insurgents blew up the power lines again.
In Baghdad, men counted votes by lanterns because the electricity was out in parts of the city. Results were written on a chalkboard. Outside, Iraqi soldiers huddled in a courtyard, breaking their fast. Northeast of the capital, in Baquba, men sat around long tables, putting "yes" votes in one pile and "no" votes in another.
A day that U.S. and Iraqi leaders feared could become bloody turned out to be the most peaceful in months, amid a heavy clampdown by U.S.-Iraqi forces across the country.
In other developments:
The country's Shiite majority, some 60 percent of its estimated 27 million people, and the Kurds, another 20 percent, largely support the approximately 140-article charter, which provides them with autonomy in the northern and southern regions where they are concentrated.
The Sunni Arab minority, which dominated the country under Saddam Hussein and forms the backbone of the insurgency, widely opposes the draft, convinced its federalist system will tear the country into Shiite and Kurdish mini-states in the south and north, leaving Sunnis in an impoverished center.
Most Sunnis appeared to be voting "no" even after one major party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, came out in support of the draft because last-minute amendments promised Sunnis the chance to try to change the charter later.
"We have entered the political process now because our rights were being usurped by others who have marginalized us," said Sunni Hazem Jassim, 45, referring to Iraq's other factions.
If the constitution fails, a new constitution must be drafted by a new parliament, to be elected in December. If it passes, a new parliament will also be elected and a new government selected, the first permanent, fully constitutional government in Iraq since collapse of Saddam Hussein's rule in 2003.
By late Saturday, Salahuddin appeared to be nearing a two-thirds "no" vote after an overwhelming showing at the polls in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, where some election officials said 90 percent of the voters cast ballots. There were no figures on Ninevah or Diyala.