This blog post was published on April 28 2010. §
Winners and losers in the new exclusion decision
Some interesting comments today made by the Sadrist leader Bahaa Al-Araji saying that contrary to expectations Maliki’s State of Law could loss two seats after the recount of the votes.
As for the new exclusion list of the 52 candidates released by the Justice and Accountability Commission, Al-Araji added that Al-Iraqiya will not loss a single seat because all the 52 candidates are already disqualified in the election.
I don’t know how Al-Araji counted his numbers, but the exclusion will not effect the results significantly, because the value of the seats may vary from one province to another.
According to the strange election algorithm, the coalition that included in the exclusion decision, may have leftover-votes (surplus) after the distribution of the seats according to the value of the seat, and an excluded candidate may have won by the “leftover” votes, and not from the his coalition seats.
Add to the above, that each coalition has its own compensatory seats, which will take the number of seats back to the coalition (but not to the same person). My own expectation is that SoL will one candidate (without losing a seat), and Al-Iraqiya will loss one seats.
The funny part reported by Al-Sumeria, as revealed by the Discriminatory Court, is that the decision of the exclusion of the 52 candidates came at the request of Maliki himself (Al-Sumeria released an image of the document)