At Last ... A Familiar Challenge In Iraq
But no better hope of resolution
In a manner that borders on the perverse, the latest challenge facing organizers of Iraq's scheduled January 30 election, Iraqis scattered abroad by the Hussein regime find the upcoming exercise in democracy confusing. The Iraqis are facing a question that plagues even the foremost allegedly-free society in the world: absentee voting.
The team hired by Iraq's electoral commission to run the U.S.-based portion of the election, which officials said may draw up to 240,000 voters, is still scrambling to find polling stations and hire personnel. Its campaign to educate people about how and where to register is just getting off the ground. And with only five designated election centers -- one in the Washington area -- thousands of Iraqis will have to travel hundreds of miles to reach a polling station.
Once there, they face the daunting task of choosing from among 111 parties on the ballot, including such groups as the Hashemite Iraqi Royal Gathering, the Unified Iraq Coalition, the List of Independents and the Gathering of Democratic Tribes of Iraq.
Unfamiliar to most first-generation Iraqi immigrants, these names mean even less to the Iraqi Americans who have never been to Iraq but are eligible to vote because their fathers were born there.
Washington Post
While absentee drama continues to play out in one corner of the United States, criticism regarding the upcoming Iraqi election is harsh. Najmaldin Karim, president of the Washington Kurdish Institute, said he thinks the organizers are "totally ignorant or incompetent or both".
Imam Husham Al Husainy, a Shiite cleric at the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Michigan, cited hundreds of calls complaining about the election process:
"I have people in every state, they have not been reached, they don't know where to go and what to do," said Al Husainy. "This is the dream of their life to have elections. This is ridiculous. . . . It reminds me of Iraq in Saddam's time."
Washington Post
Jeremy Copleand, who heads U.S. external relations for the Iraq Out-of-Country Voting Program, expressed his sympathies. It is only possible, given the circumstances, to run a limited election.
Iraqi voters in the U.S. have only five voting centers nationwide, in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Washington. Each voting center will have several polling places. The sites were selected because they are near the highest concentrations of Iraqis in the country. "We hope that through picking these five cities, we will make it easy for the majority of the Iraqis in the United States to take part in this historic election," said Copeland.
Some Iraqis living in the U.S. will have to either schedule a vacation or make two trips to the voting center; registration occurs Jan. 17-23 at polling places, and the vote will take place Jan. 28-30. Voters will be fingerprinted against fraud, and ballots will be available in Kurdish and Arabic.
To register, Iraqis must have been 18 or older by Dec. 31, and present two documents. One must be a photo ID, and the other must prove that the would-be voter is an Iraqi citizen or a former Iraqi citizen who acquired U.S. citizenship, or that the voter's father was born in Iraq. These could include a U.S. passport or Iraqi ID card.
Washington Post
Despite the frustrations, enthusiasm seems high. Jamal Fadel, 47, a physician from College Park, Maryland, pointed out, "We don't want the terrorists to win." A high turnout, said Fadel, "will give ... a message for al Qaeda that the Iraqi people don't want them."
Alyaa Mazyad, 26, a homemaker from Reston, Virginia, said she wants to vote, "because it's the first democracy election for the Iraqis." She could not say who her chosen candidate was: "I don't know all the names of the candidates."
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Ms. Mazyad ought not worry; most Americans have a hard time naming candidates in a field of under a dozen, speak nothing of over a hundred. Nonetheless, as the
Washington Post reflects its community in speaking with Iraqi voters from Maryland and Virginia, none of the voters the newspaper spoke with face a week's worth of travel in order to merely participate.
And while we might note, tongue-in-cheek, that long lines and confusing registration procedures are prevalent enough to surface in our own elections, Iraqis don't yet have a fraudulent public figure like Kenneth Blackwell to excoriate; they get to look to this election process with guarded hope at the very least.
And yes, WKI's Karim has a valid point, at least in ignorance: Americans have a hard enough time pulling off their own elections, as events in Ohio and Washington state have revealed this year; two states--Pennsylvania and Georgia--were targeted by U.S. Department of Justice lawsuits complaining about the timing of overseas ballots. It seems almost an insane challenge to blindly presume that we Americans can pull off for 28,000,000 Iraqis what it cannot do for eleven million in Ohio, or six million in Washington state. Only the 35,000,000 people in California have ever faced a ticket nearly so diverse, as over 100 people declared their intent to run for governor in the wake of Gray Davis' recall. And we can be reasonably sure that few Iraqi pornographers or ex-wives of gay politicians will be on the ticket.
To the other, though, I think perhaps Imam Al Husainy might be a little too critical. Yes, I can imagine how long lines and inadequate polling services may be reminiscent of Hussein's Iraq, but that's about as much akin to the deposed regime as the fact that both the Imam and the fallen dictator breathe. It's going to be a private ballot, for one thing. At least, in theory. Um ... yeah. And it's not like the U.S. is going to shoot people for voting for the wrong candidate. At least, not in this country. Er ... hmmm. I suppose we can only ask the Imam to give this process a chance to show itself so sinister as the Hussein regime before condemning it as such. Whether or not this opportunity is ideal, it is the opportunity at hand.
And still unresolved is the question of whether the United States and its faltering Coalition can make this election stick; that is, who's to stop the insurgency from merely cutting down the elected leaders? After all,
media reports from the last week assert that members of the Iraqi Election Commission are stepping down in large numbers after the insurgents threatened them, and last month brought
reports that the insurgency is directly targeting the politicians themselves.
Perhaps most chilling is the prospect that Dr. Fadel is incorrect, and that Iraqis will turn out and give anti-coalition politics significant support. Perhaps, as the results are counted and argued over, Iraqis will bring the United States and its Coalition a valentine that says, "Get out!"
And then, of course, well, the occupation will face the prospect of cutting down people who voted for the wrong candidates. However, there won't be nearly so direct a correlation between who votes for whom, and who dies. A mere statistical coincidence, kind of like collateral damage, and therefore something we can wash our hands of.
Like Pilate, minus the dog.
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