Interesting Editor and Publisher column about the turnout numbers for Iraq.

 

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/co...t_id=1000788083

Also, one dares to ask: If the commission expected close to 8 million, and that's what happened -- and there was less violence on election day than anticipated -- why was the turnout greeted as such a surprise? Especially since U.S. and Iraqi leaders have spent months knocking the press for failing to report that the vast majority of regions in this country are safe and friendly.

 

Interesting

 

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Howard Kurtz at least looked into the Iraqi numbers. In a Tuesday column, he observed that "the 14 million figure is the number of registered Iraqis

 

is that the 14 million, the baseline, is a very fuzzy figure because there was no registration."

 

Are those not conflicting statements.

The final observation about the failure of many polling places to oopen inevitably resulting in larger turnouts one or two towns away is also very astute:

 

All credit to the brave Iraqis who did vote, and in many places they did turn out in droves. But it occurred to me, watching the moving TV images on Sunday of people standing in line outside polling places in Sunni hot spots, that maybe, as so often, the camera lied. In many embattled Sunni cities, we'd been told, many if not most polling places never opened. Wouldn't this likely cause a crush, by even a few hundred voters, at the relatively few places that did open?

 

Not that anyone, that I know of, was asking.