In a Second-Floor Room, Iraq’s Vote Slowly Unfolds

This is vote counting the old-fashioned way. There are no giant screens flashing instant results, no multicolored charts proclaiming front-runners, trend lines and magic numbers.

Iraq’s watershed election, widely acclaimed as an inspiring example of incipient democracy amid a raging insurgency, has entered a more prosaic but no less critical phase: the final counting.

In an anonymous three-story brick building in the heavily fortified Green Zone, about 200 Iraqi men and women -- ensconced here like sequestered jurors, with sleeping quarters in an adjoining dormitory -- are conducting the tally of Sunday’s vote amid extraordinary security. They work four shifts, around the clock. The count is sophisticated even though much of it is done by hand.

By early Wednesday, half the tallies from the tens of thousands of polling places had not even made it to the second-floor nerve center here, where the figures are being tabulated. Officials say there is a long way to go -- at least another week to 10 days -- before the final results are in.

This is nothing like jet-paced Election Central, USA. No one in an official capacity has provided any results, despite the triumphant early claims of some contestants.

Leaders of a predominantly Shiite Muslim list of candidates say their slate won more than 50% of the votes cast for Iraq’s transitional national assembly. Pundits are busily handicapping future coalitions and power blocs and bandying about names for the presidency, prime minister and other top posts.

But with roughly half the votes yet to be tabulated and no official returns released, predictions about the future government’s makeup seem premature at best.

Word spread Wednesday that results for several provinces, including part of Baghdad, would be unveiled within hours, sparking a flurry of interest among a public and press corps clamoring for numbers.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, which is overseeing the balloting, had said it would release the partial results in an effort to demonstrate the transparency of the process. But it later changed its mind, saying that some results would instead be announced today.

The about-face immediately fueled speculation about back-door deals and unsavory goings-on. Authorities insisted there was nothing amiss.

“There’s no political machination behind this,” said one electoral official, who, like others interviewed, requested anonymity. “We don’t think we’ve just found some vast problem.... It’s our first time through the data. We want to make sure that we are right before [going] public.”

Here at ground zero for this scrutinized election, the count, which is being done with help from the United Nations, grinds on.

Numbers are rolling in from about 30,000 polling stations that were set up across Iraq. Voters marked ballots that, in the case of the national assembly race, contained the names of 111 political slates vying for a portion of 275 seats.

The completed ballots were placed in translucent plastic boxes that allowed voters to see the ballots but not read them. Transparent boxes were deemed too revealing, opaque boxes too secretive.

On Sunday, it was clear that Iraqi voters appreciated the tactile nature of the process. In many cases, children watched as their parents marked the ballots and placed them in the boxes.

“There’s just something very, very satisfying about marking a ballot and seeing it counted,” the electoral official said. “I would never put a machine in front of them and expect them to trust that the button they pressed was going to lead to the result they wanted.”

When the polls closed, the ballots were counted at the polling stations or alternate secure sites. Each count was to be done at least twice. Summaries of the final numbers -- for the national assembly, provincial governments and, in three northern provinces, a Kurdish parliament -- were written on tally sheets. The actual ballots were to be shipped to secure storage sites, for use in case of future challenges.

Authorities reported no major destruction of polling material, a big accomplishment in a nation where insurgents strike dozens of times each day.

The completed tally sheets were placed in plastic bags -- similar to food storage bags -- that were then glued shut. More than 100,000 Iraqi observers were accredited to watch the entire process at the polling stations.

The tallies were then placed in canvas mail sacks and taken to Baghdad under high security. Officials declined to comment on the method of transport.

The tally sheets are now arriving at a brightly lighted room in the brick building in the Green Zone, a structure that served as an arms-distribution center in the Commerce Ministry during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Staffers with scissors slice open the plastic bags containing the precious sheets -- one bag for each of the nation’s polling stations. The clerks who pull the tallies from the bags place them in separate boxes: one for national assembly votes, another for provincial elections, a third for the vote for the Kurdish parliament.

At that point, “batchers” gather the sheets into groups of 30 and clip them together. A process known as “double data entry” then begins. The method was chosen for its accuracy.

About two dozen clerks seated across from one another at a long table enter the data from the tally sheets into laptop computers. This is the sole nod to technology.

Another set of clerks then enters the same data in their laptops. A group of “super clerks” checks the entries from each tally sheet for errors. These clerks have computer programs alerting them to inconsistencies in the count.

No one in the room is allowed a pen or pencil, a precaution against tampering. To avoid double counting, colored stickers are placed on the sheets once they have been tallied. After being triple-checked, the results are entered in the database. The now-counted sheets are stored away.

Accredited observers and the media are permitted to watch from folding chairs after submitting to multiple searches and pat-downs.

Only at the end do the computers generate actual results -- and those are closely guarded. There is no deadline for completing the count.

Seats in the transitional national assembly are to be allocated proportionally. If a slate receives 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats.

The assembly will elect a president and two deputy presidents. A two-thirds majority is needed to elect the so-called presidency council. The assembly will also write a draft of a permanent constitution by Aug. 15, though a six-month extension can be requested. The draft is to be put to a national referendum in October, and elections for a permanent government are to be held by Dec. 15.

As difficult as it was to put together a successful election, officials here say the coming tasks -- forming a government, improving security and basic services, healing sectarian divisions -- loom even larger.

“In a sense, that was almost preseason football,” one Western diplomat said of the vote.

“Although the election was certainly a challenge,” he added, “in many ways the harder work is yet to begin.”