Keeping out the vote

This is rather flagrant. While the White House stenos are cheerily pushing the feel good, smiling, purple finger waggers in the Shite regions of Iraq, in the Sunni regions where the vote is expected to go to the No side, there's nowhere to vote.

"There are no voting centers in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, said on Friday, listing locations across western Anbar province.

...Hussein al-Hindawi, the head of Iraq's Electoral Commission, which is organizing the vote, said there were 77 polling centers in Ramadi and around 30 in Falluja, and said that if people couldn't find them, they should call the commission.

I don't know how far it is from one city to the other, but with the ban on any private vehicles on election day, it sounds like a hell of a long walk in 100 degree heat to start looking around for imaginary voting booths. It feels like a blatant attempt to suppress the vote to me, and no doubt will feel the same to the already marginalized Sunnis.

What a recipe for revolution. But maybe that's the plan. Then they can just kill everyone and call them all insurgents, instead of pissed off disenfranchised voters.