Monday, Jan. 17, 2005 | 10:50 a.m.
Just a few months after voting in the U.S. presidential election, Jamal Almosawy, a U.S. citizen who was born in Iraq, will be casting a ballot in the election of Iraq's new national assembly.
Almosawy, who lives in Las Vegas, is one of an estimated 240,000 Iraqis living in the United States who may be eligible to hit the polls next week in what officials are calling the largest, most complicated, in person, absentee voting program ever.
Beginning today, Iraqis living here can register to vote at any of the polling stations in the five U.S. cities approved by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq to host the voting.
The nearest of those to Las Vegas is Irvine, Calif., nearly 300 miles away. But polling stations in the United States are also planned for Detroit, Nashville, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where the heaviest concentration of Iraqis live. A total of fourteen countries are participating in the voting, and about 1.2 million expatriate Iraqis may be eligible to vote.
Almosawy, who immigrated to the country in 1980 and works for a mortgage company, plans to make the trip to Los Angeles -- twice. That's because he and his fellow Iraqis in America have to register to vote in person first. Only then can they return to cast a ballot.
Until Sunday, would-be voters can register at designated sites by bringing two forms of identification confirming their identity, Iraqi nationality and that they turned 18 before Dec. 31. Anyone who was born in Iraq, who has or once had Iraqi citizenship, or who was born to an Iraqi father may be considered an Iraqi national, according to election rules.
An external relations officer for the International Organization for Migration, the nongovernmental group selected by the Iraqi Electoral Commission to run the out-of-country voting, said as many as 67,000 eligible Iraqis may cast ballots in the elections in California next week. The polls are open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 28-30.
Only a small percentage of the thousands of voters who show up in California are likely to be from the Las Vegas area, where Almosawy said very few Iraqis live.
As in many other elections, not everyone who is eligible to vote will do so. And a combination of factors prevent many of the eligible Iraqis from casting their vote.
For some, it's a lack of interest. Thomas Kalandos, a U.S. citizen born in Iraq who has lived in Las Vegas for five years, said he did not care to vote in his birth country's election. A warehouse manager, he said he has cut his ties with Iraq.
For others, it's a lack of information. Mohammed Thomad, a structural engineer who moved to the United States from Iraq in 1982, said he will not vote because he does not know enough about the 111 political entities on the ballot to make an informed decision.
"If I knew enough about the candidates, if I believed these people were the right people for the job, that these elections would be clean and these people would represent the people, I would vote," Thomad, who typically votes in U.S. elections, said.
But despite several of his family members -- including his parents and brothers -- still residing in Baghdad, Thomad said he would not participate. He said he thought his relatives in Canada and Germany, however, were likely to vote.
Still, many people who could vote likely will not simply because they are too far from a polling station.
Jamal Almosawy said some of his Iraqi-born friends in Texas and Louisiana would like to vote but probably will not because it would be too hard to get to one of the selected cities twice.
Until Friday, just two weeks before the election, the exact locations for many of the polling stations had not been selected. According to Jennifer Salan, a communications director with the nonprofit Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., many eligible voters may still not know where they can vote or even that they can vote -- additional barriers to voter participation.
To help, the nonprofit institute planned to send a detailed e-mail about the election to its entire membership list of 10,000 people and to ask its members to forward the message to Iraqi friends, Salan said.
Almosawy hopes the message gets out there, too, because he thinks the future of Iraq is dependent upon a positive outcome to the election.
"Every Iraqi should vote; it's their duty to their country even if they do not want to go back to their home country," Almosawy said.
To help him inform his own decision on which political entity among the 111 possibilities he should vote for, Almosawy will be consulting relatives in Iraq, he said.
The decision weighs on Almosawy, he added, because the national assembly has been charged with a crucial task--writing Iraq's new constitution. And his vote may help determine which group, if any, dominates the new assembly.
That's because the 275 seats in the assembly will be filled by a system of proportional representation. If a political entity receives 20 percent of the popular vote, it will win 20 percent of the assembly, or 55 seats.
Basim Ridha Alhussaini, a field coordinator in California for the out-of-country voting, said volunteers were being trained now so that voting should take only five to seven minutes once voters make it to the sites. It will be done on paper ballots that will be counted in the United States. And voters will have their fingers marked with a special ink so they can't vote again.
Almosawy, who said three of his brothers and four of his cousins died under Saddam Hussein's regime, is excited about the opportunity to vote in Iraq's first democratic election. He doesn't mind that he has to drive all the way to Irvine to do it.
"I want a better government for my country," Almosawy said. "After the election everything will change; that's what we're hoping for."
More information on out-of-country voting is available at www.iraqocv.org or by calling 1-800-916-8292. Registration and voting in Irvine will take place at El Toro Facility, 7040 Trabuco Road, Irvine, CA 92618.
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