Ben writes:

What Simon is noticing is [...]

Well, no -- just like the Bush administration was wrong to say it had "learned" of Saddam's attempts to buy African Yellowcake (they knew or should have known it wasn't true; you can only say you "learned" stuff that you later still think is true; you say you "heard" what you later know to be lies, not "learned" them), you're wrong to say "Simon" (it's a pseudonym, BTW, not a real name; hence the quote marks) is "noticing" anything here.

[...] that it takes a supermajority to not accept the proposed Constitution. So if 2/3 of the country objects, it still becomes the Constitution.

Yeah, that's what Simon is claiming, but AFAICS, he's wrong.

That's the opposite of what you're describing as natural and reasonable.

Sure it is; but since that's not the actual case, the actual case -- as Scott reports Wikipedia has it -- may still be natural and reasonable. In fact, from what little I've seen here, I myself tend to think it is.

Apparently dislike of the proposed Constitution is running so high that they think it might get rejected anyways, so they are preventing that by changing the rule to 2/3 of the registered voters, not 2/3 of those who voted. Given a guaranteed low turnout in some areas, that makes it effectively impossible for the country to reject the Constitution.

"Apparently" to you, perhaps, but that's not how it appears to me from Scott's Wikipedia quote:

The proposed constitution will be approved if in the referendum both a majority of voters nationwide vote "yes" and there are not at least three governorates (of the country's 18) where two-thirds of the voters vote "no".

Let's parse:

The proposed constitution will be approved if in the referendum both a majority of voters nationwide vote "yes" [...]

AND:

[...] and there are not at least three governorates (of the country's 18) where two-thirds of the voters vote "no".

The first bit says, as is natural and reasonable, that it takes more than 50% total, of all voters nationwide, to approve.

Apparently -- to me -- the controversy is about the second bit, where any three provinces out of 18 can veto the whole thing -- in effect, any one-sixth of the nation has the power to thwart the remaining five-sixths' wish to adopt the constitution. To demand that it at least take two-thirds of this one-sixth to do this, doesn't seem all that unnatural or unreasonable to me. It only means it takes one-ninth of the population, instead of just one-twelfth, to potentially cancel out the will of all the remaining eight-ninths (instead of eleven-twelfths). [This is all of course somewhat simplified so as to be arithmetically straightforward; it assumes the provinces are all equal in population size.]

So the two-thirds thing really isn't unreasonable. The "all registered" vs "all voting", OTOH, might be... But I'm not too sure even of that, yet.