Iraqi constitution in doubt - along with vote tallies

so much for all the "happy talk" and "purple thumb" spin coming out of the white house...

Two Sunni-dominated provinces in Iraq have rejected the country's draft constitution, according to partial results given by election officials.

Electoral rules mean the document will fail if three out of the 18 provinces vote "No" by two-thirds or more.

[...]

Now all eyes are on the largely Sunni province of Nineveh where the result is due to be announced within two days.

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If the constitution were to fail, it would set the political process back by roughly a year.

New elections will be held in December and the resulting parliament would again undertake the task of producing another constitution, our correspondent says.

In Anbar, 97% of voters cast "No" ballots while it was 82% against in Salahuddin, electoral commission chief Abdel Hussein al-Hindawi told reporters, quoting preliminary figures.

nineveh is the province where the vote count has been in dispute...

According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) in Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000 against. Those figures were said to be based on results from more than 90 percent of the 300 polling stations in the province.

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However, according to the U.S. military liaison with the IECI in Nineveh, Maj. Jeffrey Houston, the final totals for the province were 424,491 "no" votes and 353,348 "yes" votes. This means that the earlier figures actually represented only 54 percent of the official vote total -- not 90 percent, as the media had been led to believe. And the votes which had not been revealed earlier went against the constitution by a ratio more than 12 to 1.

as iraq teeters on the edge of civil war, the death toll for u.s. troops is close to surpassing 2000...

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