Talk:United Iraqi Alliance win slight majority

This was my first WikiNews Edit, so I hope oldtimers will correct any style or other errors I have made. Basically I had always wanted to see tables of the election results and especially I wanted to see them compared to the population group percentages in Iraq. So I went and did it myself here. I hope that is appropriate and I hope it is useful to others.

The hard part was getting accurate estimated population percentages. I finally remembered the CIA World Book as a source for that kind of imformation. However, the Kurds are an Ethnic group whereas the Shiite and Sunni are Religious groups. In fact from other sources I know that the Kurds are almost completely Shiite, so I had to subtract the Kurds percentages from the Shiite percentages found in the CIA World Book. The raw numbers from the CIA World Book and my manipulation of them are as follows:

CIA World Book:
  Ethnic groups: Arab 75%-80%,   Kurdish 15%-20%,   Turkoman, Assyrian or other 5%
  Religions:     Muslim 97% (Shi'a 60%-65%,   Sunni 32%-37%), Christian or other 3%

My Numbers:
  Shiite     40%-50%
  Sunni      32%-37%
  Kurdish    15%-20%
  Other       3%-5%

I hope this is alright for a WikiNews article. Is it? -- FrankH 07:56, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Nice job Frank, I was pushed for time yesterday so it was quite basic. CGorman 14:15, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have some problems with the statistics, as I do those a lot in R/L and therefore have obnoxiously unrealistic standards (so I'm not going to dispute any of it.) However, beware of unascribed opinions: "Many Sunni voters stayed away ... either because of a fear of violence or to support the call by some radical clerics to boycott the elections." We don't know why. And the "radical" is a point of view; obviously if many clerics - or other public figures - call for a boycott then they are not radical. But excellent expansion, addressing some of my questions. - Amgine 15:12, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Turnouts

I did some calculations using the numbers in the bottom table and found that the estimated turnout percentage ranges of the various groups are:

          Turnout
Group    High  Low
Shiite    95%	76%
Kurdish  105%	79%
Sunni      4%	3%
Other     98%	59%

I also remember reading in early news report that the turnout was over 80% in Shiite areas. Thus I think it is a fact to say that The Shiite and Kurdish groups had more than 80% turnout whereas the Sunni group had a turnout under 4%. If anyone disagrees, let me know. -- FrankH 20:33, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Pie chart

That pie chart seems incredibly pointless.