(1)
Isn’t democracy wonderful? (Note: the article has been revised slightly since I pulled the quotes used here.)

Seven weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, a special elections court disqualified a winning parliamentary candidate, likely reversing the narrow defeat of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition and possibly allowing him the first chance to form a new coalition government.

The court disqualified the candidate on charges he was a loyalist of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and left open the possibility or barring still more.

The court’s decisions, if upheld on appeal, would erase the two-seat victory by a largely secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who served as an interim prime minister after the American overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Like they say, if at first you don’t succeed…

What I find really puzzling is Iraqi election math. For instance, how does disqualifying one winning candidate erase a two-seat margin?

Then there’s this:

The court also disqualified 51 other losing candidates and the votes they received will be discarded, requiring a recalculation of the winners – and losers – across the ballot. Under Iraq’s tortuous and untested election laws, that could cost Mr. Allawi’s bloc a second seat, while awarding seats to Mr. Maliki or other parties, officials said.

I’m no expert on local eccentricities in democracy across the world, but I would venture a guess that there are very few democracies where disqualifying losing candidates can have the effect of reversing election results. Under what conceivable set of rules could disqualifying losing candidates (and the votes they received) require a recalculation of who’s the winner? If you disqualify a losing candidate and nullify his votes, doesn’t the vote count of the remaining candidates remain unchanged? Whoever won before is still the winner?

The funny thing is that neither the NYT nor Steven Lee Myers, who wrote the piece, find anything puzzling in the two passages I’ve quoted. They offer no explanation of any kind, for either statement. They don’t even seem to realize that any explanation is called for.

So, in all fairness, the statement “Isn’t democracy wonderful!” should be balanced by the statement “Isn’t journalism wonderful!”

(2)
I have not yet found a clear exposition anywhere, but my current hypothesis — based on much reading between the lines of articles written by wily journalists who know better than to give too much away lest they actually inform the public — is as follows:

• The Iraqi elections don’t seem to operate as a bunch of separate contests for individual seats.
• There seems to be some notion of taking the aggregate vote count of each party and allocating them seats based on the aggregate number of votes they received.
• The candidates of each party are ranked by the number of votes they received.
• Then, if a party is allocated ten seats, the first ten candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.
• So when a bunch of candidates are disqualified, and their votes nullified, the number of of seats allocated to a given party may or may not change.
• If it doesn’t change, but two of its candidates were disqualified, then the next two candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.

(Here’s the article I found that came closest to expressing some of this.)

I find it truly mindboggling that the NYT would publish the article they did without providing any kind of explanation at all of this unique and unfamiliar election system.