MOOKIEMANDERING:

In Iraq, a preelection power play: As parties haggle over candidate lists, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fights for a top spot. (Annia Ciezadlo, 12/03/04, CS Monitor)

"The election is like an exam," says Sheikh Fatih Kashif al-Ghitta, a Shiite cleric from a prominent Najaf political family. "[It] will show who really has a base of popular support and who is a fake; who has religious authority and who does not. It will clarify many things."

Each group draws up a list of candidates, ranked first to last.

The total votes each party receives will determine how many seats it gets in Iraq's National Assembly. Because seats are doled out in the same order as the list, highly placed candidates are more likely to get a seat.

Every third candidate must be a woman, in order to avoid parties putting all the women at the bottom of the list, a typical maneuver in some countries with gender quotas.

Voters won't have to sift through hundreds of names at the ballot box; rather, they'll see parties' names and logos. [...]

The hottest ticket in town is the main Shiite slate, which is endorsed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's foremost religious authority and kingmaker.

Ayatollah Sistani insisted that Iraq's Shiite majority, long suppressed by the Sunni minority and eager to take power, form a unified slate that will almost certainly have the maximum of 275 candidates.

But Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite clergy's enfant terrible, is reportedly causing an uproar by insisting that some names be thrown off the unified Shiite list.

He's also demanding top billing, above former Governing Council members Ibrahim Jafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, both former exiles. "Moqtada argues that he is better known and more popular than all of them," says Mr. Ghitta.

Nice to see al-Sadr figuring out you don't need to shoot your way to power.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2004 6:58 PM