Phony "elections" in Iraq are nothing new. Scott Ritter reported on the massive Bush regime election fraud in 2005. Now the puppet regime Iraq is continuing the tradition by engaging in massive election fraud in the regional elections that occurred earlier this year.

Do we know this because of the New York Times, the CBS Evening News, or CNN? That was a joke. They are still doing their utmost to shill for the Iraq War. That's why Alternet and other independent media are so important. From Abeer Mohammed and Neil Arun of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, we find out the following in a 3/3/09 Alternet article.

Iraq's election commission is fighting back against claims that it failed to take account of grave violations in tightly contested provincial polls.

Last week it released final results from the January 31 election, confirming Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's allies came top in ten of 14 provinces where polls were held.

It also released details of electoral violations, confirming that none of the 20 cases of serious fraud it had investigated were severe enough to affect the overall outcome.

Sound good? It shouldn't. Stalin and Hitler said that their elections were fair and free too. Later in the article, we find out what really happened.

Over the last few weeks, IWPR-trained journalists have gathered several reports of alleged violations, ranging from ballot boxes going temporarily missing to family members voting for absent relatives.

The strongest allegations of fraud so far have come from the Iraqiya list of former prime minister Ayad Allawi.

"The majority of violations occurred in Baghdad, Salahaddin and Anbar," said Ali Nesaif, a member of parliament with Allawi's list. "Some boxes were stolen from polling centers in Salahaddin as well as Diyala."

...

The Sadrist bloc has also voiced anger at the election commission's findings.

"We have been mistreated in this election. IHEC was not fair -- it was biased in favor of other lists," Amir Tahar al-Kinani, the leader of a list backing Sadr told IWPR.

He pointed out that initial results showed the party was in second place in Maysan province, followed by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, SIIC.

"In the final results, we dropped to third position, while SIIC took second place. How can that happen?" asked Kinani.

...

A list led by Ali Hatim Sulaiman, a tribal leader, was challenging initial results in Anbar, said the source.

SIIC, which currently runs Baghdad's provincial council, had reportedly contested votes in the capital.

It happened the same way that Bush "won" the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections here in the US: via fraud.

There was even open vote buying by an election observer. This sounds like a GOP wet dream.

Abu Qasim, a 44-year-old government employee in Baghdad, said he saw an election observer issuing ten U.S. dollar mobile phone cards in front of a polling station.

"When I saw this, I returned home without voting because I realised that the country is ruined and the elections don't mean anything anymore," he said.

If newspapers reported important news stories like these rather than censoring them, they wouldn't be in as big of a financial mess. Why should people pay money to be misled and defrauded?

When any politicians talk about Iraq being a "democracy," you know they are lying through their teeth. There is no democracy in Iraq. The overall level of violence is higher now than it was before the escalation due to the fact that the main source of the violence, the US military, has severely escalated its killings.

It's all a crock of shit.