Early Voting in Iraq

A quick update on my last post: Juan Cole, who's been blogging for a long time while I've just started, notes that al-Hayat has preliminary reports on the early voting results. Those of you who read Arabic can see the original al-Hayat story here. He notes that the sample is skewed since early voting was open to limited groups: he cites the police and the sick (by which I think he means hospital patients, since I've seen them noted as eligible); the Army and prisoners were apparently also eligible for early voting, according to the New York Times.

The problem, of course, is that not only are these highly skewed results (as Cole notes) because of the nature of the groups (the Army and police are clearly stakeholders in the present government; as for the prisoners, I have no idea where they would come down), but just as political polling doesn't work very well in countries where there is no long history of voting, there's really nothing to compare the results to. The 2005 elections were just too different: it was the height of the insurgency, and almost all the Sunni community and substantial numbers of poorer Shi'ites boycotted. (The electoral system has been revised as well.)

Still, these early returns suggest the parties already in power are doing well, which is hardly surprising given the role of patronage.