Via the NYT: Shiites Leading in Hussein’s Home Province

The first election returns from the Sunni majority heartland north of Baghdad showed Monday that a low Sunni turnout in Saddam Hussein’s home province has given a lead in the voting there to a Shiite political alliance led by the southern clerics who were among Mr. Hussein’s most bitter enemies.

That tends to happen: if one purposefully chooses not to participate in an open process, one tends to be left out. It certainly beats the way the Shiites were left out of the mix during the Saddam years…

One would guess, as NPR reported yesterday, that some Sunni now regret not voting, given the way election day played out.

Further, I still expect that accomodations will be made for the Sunnis once the assembly is selected and meets.

Here are the latest election returns:

With 4.6 million votes now tallied, the Shiite alliance still accounts for just more than 50 percent of the national vote, down from more than 70 percent in initial counts last week. The Kurdish alliance now has 25 percent, and Dr. Allawi, the interim prime minister, 13 percent.

[…]

The overall picture seems certain to change again as the election commission announces more results, against a tentative deadline for a final result in three to six days. Leaders of the Shiite alliance have said they are counting on increasing their vote share to at least 55 percent as more votes come in from eight predominantly Shiite southern provinces, including Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city behind Baghdad. Partial returns for these provinces have totaled only 1.6 million votes, one for every five people, across an area where turnouts as high as 80 percent were reported on election day. Iraqi politicians say that could mean another 1.5 million southern votes yet to be counted, most of them for Shiite parties. The Shiite alliance has also polled strongly in Baghdad, where about one million votes have been counted, in a city with a population of at least six million. As many as one million more votes are also expected from the Kurdish north.