… but not enough. “No” votes were 55% and “yes” votes were 45%. This doesn’t sound too out of line to me. This means Iraq has a new con­sti­tu­tion.
For the con­sti­tu­tion to have failed, it needed to be voted down by at least 66% in any three provinces. Anbar and Sula­hadin both reached this point, but Nin­eveh and Diyalah did not.
The real ques­tion now will be whether the Sun­nis will accept this vote as fair. Saleh Mut­laq of the National Dia­logue Coun­cil and oth­ers have said they defeated the ref­er­en­dum in all four Sunni-majority provinces: Anbar, Diyala, Sulah­hadin and Ninevah. But the num­bers released by the IECI today don’t show that, obvi­ously. Dialya and Ninevah have sig­nif­i­cant non-Sunni pop­u­la­tions: Shi’ites in Diyala and Kurds, Chris­tians and Turko­mans in Nin­eveh. Anbar and Sulah­hadin both rejected the char­ter by wide mar­gins.
“As I wrote”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/10/quiet_election_1.php, this is the worst-case scenario:

The absolute worst-case sce­nario is if the Sun­nis come close to defeat­ing the con­sti­tu­tion, but fail. There will be accu­sa­tions of vote-rigging and any polit­i­cal momen­tum the Sun­nis felt was mov­ing their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have con­sol­i­dated their power and those Sun­nis on the fence might be moved into active oppo­si­tion. The insur­gency might even worsen, if such things are pos­si­ble, or a close vote might be the trig­ger for open civil war.

Still, it’s not impos­si­ble that Sun­nis might see the light of rea­son in this and decide to come out and vote on Dec. 15 for a per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment. A last-minute deal between the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Shi’ite and Kur­dish groups agreed that the per­ma­nent con­sti­tu­tion would be more tem­po­rary than the name implies. The lead­ers agreed that after the elec­tion in Decem­ber — which will see an increase in the num­ber of Sun­nis in par­lia­ment — the con­sti­tu­tion will be thrown open to amend­ments. Shi’ite politi­cians such as Jawad al-Maliki of the Dawa Party said it would be open to only some fine-tuning. The Iraqi Islamic Party said, how­ever, that the whole thing was open for dis­cus­sion. The truth is all groups were play­ing to their base in the hopes of turn­ing out the vote, so the actual state of nego­ti­a­tions lies some­where in between the two extremes. Luck­ily, there are still nego­ti­a­tions, which is bet­ter than noth­ing, I sup­pose.
And already, some Sunni politi­cians are sound­ing con­cil­ia­tory notes. Mishaan al-Jubouri, a Sunni leg­is­la­tor from the Lib­er­a­tion and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Party, said, “We will par­tic­i­pate in the next elec­tions. We will try to make a demo­c­ra­tic, sec­u­lar major­ity in the par­lia­ment and try to change the con­sti­tu­tion.“
He groused that the rea­son Nin­eveh didn’t pass was that sev­eral Kur­dish cities — Makhmor, Okhra and Shikhan — were included in the province that, his­tor­i­cally, should not have been included. These cities are all Fallujah-sized or smaller, mean­ing around 250,000 peo­ple or so. (“Prob­a­bly half a mil­lion each now,” A., my office man­ager, grum­bled, voic­ing the sus­pi­cion that Kurds had swamped the city with new vot­ers just before the ref­er­en­dum.)
But, al-Jubouri added, “I don’t think that there was manip­u­la­tion of the votes _after the clos­ing of the bal­lot boxes_.” Despite my empha­sis, this is a good sign, I think. He also said he is already look­ing ahead to Dec. 15, when Iraqis go to the polls, _again_, and elect a per­ma­nent par­lia­ment. “We will run in Baby­lon, Bagh­dad, Diyalah, Anbar, Sula­hadin, Ninevah and Kirkuk,” he said, and added he would like to form a par­lia­men­tary coali­tion with for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Iyad Allawi’s bloc. “I think he will win a major­ity of seats in the next par­lia­ment.“
But this brings up the point of what the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Iraq will look like down the road. Assum­ing this smol­der­ing civil war doesn’t ignite fur­ther, _this is the polit­i­cal situation:_ A con­stantly shift­ing set of alliances with Sun­nis gen­er­ally com­ing out with the short end of the stick. Strat­for (sub­scrip­tion only, sorry) notes that this means that pol­i­tics and the trap­pings of state will fade into the back­ground. “The rest of soci­ety — clans, fam­i­lies, cor­po­ra­tions, orga­nized crime — are empha­sized,” the think tank reports. “An Iraq with eter­nally shift­ing pol­i­tics is not incom­pat­i­ble with the notion of a func­tion­ing soci­ety.“
Maybe. But a nation with those insti­tu­tions empow­ered instead of the state sure sounds dif­fer­ent from what the United States has pub­licly stated is the desired end result: a demo­c­ra­tic, united, fed­eral and plu­ral­is­tic state. In fact, with the excep­tion of cor­po­ra­tions, it sounds a lot like Iraq today.
PS: Here’s a table of the final per­cent­ages. “Click here”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/upload/2005/10/results_25.pdf for a PDF of all the results.

BAGHDAD — Pre­lim­i­nary num­bers from the Inde­pen­dent Elec­toral Com­mis­sion in Iraq, based on an audit of 20 per­cent of bal­lot boxes from last Saturday’s con­sti­tu­tional ref­er­en­dum show mas­sive “yes” votes in most provinces. But the most closely watched one, Ninevah, is rapidly turn­ing into the Ohio of Iraq.

*Still to come:*
_Ninevah_, Anbar, Babil, Basra and Erbil.
In a state­ment, the IECI said, “These results are not a demo­graph­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant sam­ple of all polling sta­tions so they can­not be used to pre­dict the final out­come of the Ref­er­en­dum.” Babil, Basra, Erbil and Ninevah are cur­rently under­go­ing field audits, while Anbar votes are still being input into the sys­tem, the state­ment said. No one expects Anbar to vote for the ref­er­en­dum, and Babil, Basra and Erbil are expected to vote “yes” in high per­cent­ages. That leaves Ninevah and Mosul as the swing votes that will decide this elec­tion, as it takes a two-thirds “no” vote in three provinces to veto the con­sti­tu­tion.
“I wrote about the vot­ing hanky-panky going on in Ninevah on Monday”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2005/10/curious_numbers.php, and it seems like the IECI is tak­ing it seri­ously. I don’t know how it will go, but I sure hope that they can show the vote was fair.