Why UNCEI Now?
UNCEI is the petition acronym for: United Nations run Census and Elections for Iraq. The petition started in March 2006 and was addressed to the Secretary General of the UN. The recent events in Iraq, including the banning of mainly opposition candidates, stimulated me to re-write the petition and re-direct it to the President of the United States of America, Mr. Barack Obama.
UNCEI compares with other possible types of election supervision, such as an Afghanistan style international commission with wider mandate as favoured by my friend Reidar Visser.
Apart from the requirement for legislation in order to enact such a commission and the short time before the Iraqi parliamentary elections in March 2010, such a commission does not have a strong enough mandate to decide on the most serious form of fraud: Vote rigging.
Whereas banning of opposition parties, coercion and bribery may have some limited effect on the election results, only vote rigging can lead to massive swing. Vote rigging criminals can reach a degree of sophistication where they could add token rigged votes to their opposition then accuse them of the same crime they themselves have committed; a possible case in point is Afghanistan’s third presidential nominee Dr. Ramadan Bashardost, who could hardly pay for election campaigning, yet was found by the richer incumbent to have rigged ballots.
I see re-activating UNCEI now as a necessity; no matter how the issue of banned candidates is resolved vote rigging remains a real possibility in the March elections and the mechanisms for dealing with it at present are ineffective.
To stop the possibility of vote rigging, a reliable population census is a prerequisite, then a commission with a strong international mandate to supervise, examine and resolve election fraud including vote rigging should be established. UNCEI proposes both.