GO FOR WHAT YOU KNOW

Human rights activists in Iraq claim there are no polling stations in parts of the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, in western Iraq, for a referendum today on the country's new constitution....

Much of the population is expected to vote against the US-backed constitution.

"There are no voting centres in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, listing locations across the western province.

"There aren't actually any voting centres or even voting sheets in these cities ... Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to," he said of the predominantly Sunni Arab region....

--Reuters yesterday

... as the House Judiciary Democratic Committee investigation found in Ohio, "There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Right after the election the Washington Post reported that, "local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry."

--Tova Andrea Wang, "Waiting for Democracy," Century Foundation comment on the 2004 election, 6/24/2005

(Reuters link via Juan Cole.)