SUNNI COMPLAINTS SYMPTOMATIC OF "SORE LOSER SYNDROME"

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 BASRAH 000001

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 1/2/2016
TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM IZ
SUBJECT: SUNNI COMPLAINTS SYMPTOMATIC OF "SORE LOSER SYNDROME"

REF: BASRAH 158

CLASSIFIED BY: Ken Gross, Regional Coordinator, REO Basrah,
State.
REASON: 1.4 (b),(d)




1. (C) Summary: On December 28, the Basrah Regional
Coordinator (RC) met with Hazim Joda, the manager of the Basrah
Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, and discussed
allegations of fraud during the December 15 election. Hazim
assured the RC that there had been no widespread fraud during
the elections in the southern provinces. Most of the complaints
he fielded in Basrah were from "sore loser" parties that did not
get as many votes as they had hoped. All complaints registered
with the IECI were being handled seriously, Hazim said, in order
to show that the IECI was a transparent and competent
organization. He himself had been surprised that the Sunni
parties did not win more support, saying that the Sunni
population must be smaller than he had realized. End Summary.

No Serious Fraud in Basrah
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2. (SBU) On December 28, the Basrah RC met with Hazim Joda,
the manager of the Basrah IECI and discussed allegations of
fraud during the December 15 election. He acknowledged having
received many complaints, including fourteen "serious"
complaints, but that most of them had been lodged by only a few
parties and were not indicative of widespread fraud. Hazim said
he had taken painstaking efforts to follow IECI procedures to
dispel notions that the IECI was biased or incompetent. On
election day, he said that a cell phone fraud "hotline" had been
set up that rang non-stop throughout the day. He distinguished
between serious and frivolous complaints and sent anonymous
complaints without any specifics on to Baghdad with the
recommendation that they were "not serious."


3. (SBU) Hazim accredited allegations that police had been
able to vote more than once to the general population's lack of
understanding of the police and the arrangements for special
elections. There were four different types of police, he
explained, and some were permitted to vote in the special
elections on December 12, 13 and 14, while others voted on
December 15. This gave the appearance that police were voting
more than once, because people were able to observe police
officers voting on different days. He said that on December 15,
he had received several calls from polling center managers who
had asked him if they should allow the police officers to vote.
He said that police who had already voted had their
identification cards and badges punched, and as long as their
cards and badges had not been punched, he told the managers to
let the police vote.

IECI Response to Tawafuq Allegations
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4. (C) Hazim said that Tawafuq (618) party representatives
came to him on December 17 and lodged 79 complaints about the
election. (See reftel for more discussion on 618 List's
complaints.) They had not followed proper procedures in lodging
their complaints, he said, because they had not had their
complaint forms signed by the managers of the polling centers
where they were alleging fraud. Instead, they had apparently
downloaded the form off the Internet and filled out numerous
complaints after it became clear they had not done as well as
they had hoped.


5. (C) As for special elections at Camp Bucca on December 12,
Hazim said that Tawafuq representatives alleged that many Sunni
votes had not been counted. Hazim pulled a stack of papers out
of his briefcase and showed that there had been 17 official
observers of the counting of the vote from the Bucca polling
stations, three of them from Tawafuq. At the end of the
counting, each of the 17 observers signed their names to a
document attesting that there had been no problems or fraud.
Nonetheless, the same Tawafuq representatives who had signed the
document then filed an allegation of fraud on December 17.
Hazim had forwarded his documentation on to IECI Baghdad with
the recommendation that it was not a credible complaint.

The Real Surprise: Small Sunni Population in the South
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6. (C) Hazim said that he had been surprised at the outcome of
the election, and that he had thought that the Unified Iraqi
Coalition (UIC) would only win 40-50 percent of the votes. He
chalked the strong showing of 555 up to the Al Jazeera program
that broadcast allegedly disparaging remarks about Ayatollah
Sistani a few days prior to the election, resulting in a
backlash against the secular party lists. Most importantly, he
did not believe that 555 had engaged in significant fraud to
secure votes.


7. (C) Hazim also said that he had miscalculated the Sunni
population in the south. Before the election, he thought the
Sunnis made up around 30 percent of Basrah's population, but now
he believed that the real percentage must be much lower. Hazim
said that many Sunnis had left Iraq for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
and Bahrain since the ground war ceased. (Comment: The Sunni
population was estimated by many sources to be around 20-30
percent in Basrah before the election. Now, some estimates are
that the Sunni population is around 5 percent. We believe that
the 5 percent figure is too low, but that the 20 percent figure
is too high. End comment.)

The Real Winner: Democracy
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8. (SBU) Comment: The December 15 election in Basrah appears
to have been free, fair, largely peaceful, and without any
significant fraud. In the words of Hazim, a regular and
reliable REO Basrah contact, the election process was the "real
winner." While some fraud and voting irregularities may have
taken place in the south, there is no indication that the
overall outcome of the vote on December 15 was affected.
Allegations of fraud and irregularity in the south came almost
exclusively from minority parties that did not receive as many
votes as they had hoped, but whose representatives also have
stated that they did not intend to contest the results. The
only real surprise was the apparently small number of Sunnis in
Basrah. End Comment.
GROSS