Parties say violations hurt Sunni turnout

BAGHDAD -- As reports pour in from thousands of Iraqi poll observers, several political parties are alleging polling violations and logistical problems on Sunday that they say helped depress the election turnout among the country's disaffected Sunni Muslims.

In Kirkuk, where Sunni Arabs vie with Kurds for control, Sunni leaders said Kurdish officials opened extra polling stations in Kurdish neighborhoods but forced Arab villagers to walk long distances.

In Aadhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, most polling centers did not open, and at those that did, many Sunnis found their names missing from voting lists, according to party observers.

And in Samawa, in the heavily Shi'ite south, one woman told an observer for the Constitutional Monarchy Party that a female poll worker warned her that if she did not vote for a slate of prominent candidates for Shi'ite Islamist parties, the clerics would nullify her marriage.

Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer, acknowledged yesterday that tens of thousands of voters were shut out because polling stations ran out of ballots. According to the leaders of two parties whose efforts to reach out to Sunni voters have been praised by US diplomats, many of those excluded prospective voters were Sunnis in key areas in the north, including restive Mosul and Kirkuk.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq has issued general promises to look into all allegations. Tallying the votes to determine the results and the turnout could take a week to 10 days. Violence and intimidation also have been blamed for keeping Sunnis from polls.

''The elections took place under difficult conditions, and this undoubtedly deprived a number of citizens in a number of areas from voting," Abdul Hussein al-Hindawi, head of the commission, said yesterday.

Mishaan Jabouri, whose Homeland Party has argued that not all former Ba'ath Party members should be excluded from future Iraqi governments, and Sharif Ali, a relative of Iraq's deposed king and leader of the Constitutional Monarchy Party, said in interviews yesterday that the voting problems in Mosul, Kirkuk, and central Sunni areas such as Samarra and Ramadi would further alienate Sunni Muslims.

''I think the order came from Baghdad," said Jabouri, who said he believes electoral employees ''worked to keep Sunni Arabs away from the ballot."

US and Iraqi officials worried before the vote that low Sunni turnout could throw the ballot's legitimacy into doubt. US diplomats had pleaded with Sunni leaders to participate. They had also asked an influential clerics' group to call off its demands for a boycott.

At the headquarters of the Constitutional Monarchy Party, which appeals to both Sunni and Shi'ite voters who look back fondly on Iraq's period of relative stability under a British-installed monarchy in the mid-20th century, party workers were buzzing through offices yesterday, signing letters of complaint bound for the electoral commission.

Maysem Khalial Yacoub, 35, a Sunni from Aadhamiya, where many residents are affiliated with the former military, wanted to vote but found that four polling centers did not open, probably because poll workers were afraid to show up in a neighborhood where insurgents had issued threats against the election.

She said Iraqi police told her that she could vote on the outskirts of the neighborhood, but with gun battles between insurgents and police breaking out nearby, she was afraid to go.

''This is obviously marginalizing the Sunnis' role in the government," she said. ''There has been an injustice."

At one of the voting centers where Aadhamiya residents were sent, problems persisted, said Omar al Rahmani, head of Baghdad's city council and a member of the Constitutional Monarchy Party. He said his mother and sister were not allowed to vote because their names were not on a list of residents, though they had been living there for years.

And Iqbal Na'aman Marouf, another member, said she was thwarted in her attempt to observe ballot counting at a polling center in the area.

''They said, no one is allowed to stay and watch," she said of the election workers.

A tally from party observers who were able to watch vote counts at other polling centers near Aadhamiya showed large majorities for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shi'ite Islamist slate -- unusual, party members said, in an area that is largely Sunni.

''We'll have to see how it affected the vote. But clearly the Alliance did very well," Sharif Ali said of problems. He said he did not believe that calls from some Sunni clerics to boycott the election were the primary reason for low Sunni turnout. ''There is no Sunni boycott," he said. ''Where they could vote, they did vote."

Jabouri said many Sunnis decided at the last minute to vote because they realized they would be shut out of the new power structure if they did not participate. But when they showed up at polling stations in Mosul, they found difficulties.

In one section, Jabouri and Ali said, only one polling station existed, and it was being openly run by staff loyal to Ahmed Ajil al-Yawer, brother of the interim president.

In other areas, polling stations ran out of ballots and waited hours for them to be replenished. In several cases, US soldiers or Iraqi troops took away ballot boxes before election workers could count them inside the polling stations, according to Jabouri and Ali. Security concerns were cited as the reason.

Saleh al Sakhmani, 42, a member of the Constitutional Monarchy Party, said that in Samawa, many electoral workers were openly supporting the Shi'ite Islamist list. At five polling centers he visited, he said, people were handing out handbills, urging people that their clerics demand they vote for the list.

In Hawija, outside Kirkuk, only 14,000 ballot papers were delivered to an area that had 22,000 eligible voters, said Mustafa al-Tamawi, an official for Jabouri's party. The station ran out of ballots by 11 a.m., and it was not until 3 p.m. that, 6,000 more were delivered, still not enough.

Ahmad Hamid al Obeydi, a member of the Party of the Iraqi Tribes, said he and other leaders planned to stage a protest today in Kirkuk.

Globe correspondent Delphine Minoui contributed to this story from Kirkuk.