I passed fourth grade math. I remember adding up numbers into the millions. Subtraction would sometimes confuse me - especially if there were a lot of zeroes in the top number but I caught on pretty quick. I’ve even been known to call on my adding/subtracting skills since fourth grade. For the life of me though, I can’t figure out what’s happening with the Iraqi elections.

Here’s the problem: What was the turnout percentage in the Iraqi election?

We’ve been fed breathless and uncorroborated reports that about 8 million votes have been cast. We’ve heard numbers as high as 72% (freedom!), which got backed down to 57% (still good, still good), and which the corporate media helpfully rounded to 60% (better! Of course that means that Kerry got 50% of the vote in November, but that’s another story.) So how hard can this be?

Well, like any fourth grader knows, to do math, you have to know what you know and what you’re being asked. Does “percentage of Iraqis who voted” mean percentage of registered voters or percentage of eligible voters? In the US we go with eligible voters, but there’s no need to impose our kind of democracy on Iraq. We’re not pushy. We can go with registered voters. Still, no matter what you decide, it’s hard to get a firm figure.

We’ve heard that there are 14 million eligible voters:

Iraq has a population of more than 25 million people, but 40 percent of them are under the age of 14 (in the United States, 20 percent of the population is 14 or younger). This young population leaves just 14 million Iraqis eligible — and 1.2 million of them live outside the country.

But according to Howie Kurtz, via dKos, the number of eligible voters is 18 million:

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, while turnout is usually calculated using the number of eligible voters. The number of adults in Iraq is probably closer to 18 million,” which would lower the turnout figure to 45% (if, indeed, the 8 million number holds up).

D’oh! This is more complicated than Social Security. Let’s split the difference, assume a great deal of information not in evidence and say that the turnout was 50%. And if elections ended with the voting, we’d be all set. Haul out the aircraft carrier, hang the banner and make the speech. But, as Stalin is said to have told us, it’s not who votes that counts, it’s the people who count the votes. And that is something the current administration has learned well, which brings us to Part Two of our problem: The Recountening.

With allegedly 3.3 million, supposedly half, of the votes counted and reports leaking out that Sistani’s Iraqi United Alliance is holding a wide lead and putting Allawi’s team in a distant third behind the indominatable Kurds, the Iraqi election commission has announced that there are 300 boxes of ballots that need to be investigated. In a democracy voting irregularities can not stand. Now look at those boxes. They’d have to hold fifty thousand ballots each to begin to make a difference and they’re the size of the containers I use to store my sweaters. But every vote should count so rock on, Iraqi election commission. What’s troubling is this bit of news released today:

The commission doesn’t want to seem as if it’s favoring one party over another, and as a result it won’t release any more partial tallies of the votes, Ayar said.

Reporting partial tallies is tantamount to favoring a party? Does anyone else feel BushCo’s clammy hand of Information=Opinion on this? Poor Iraq probably didn’t see this coming, although we could have told them that when it comes to election results BushCo isn’t so much about the freedom thing as he is the secret, unauditable ballot counted by loyal party members. Live and learn.

The next numbers we’ll hear out of Iraq will be the official results. The math won’t be tough to check, but thanks to our jolly corporate media, BushCo’s not being required to show his work.