Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 | 11:09 a.m.
Last week, Jamal Almosawy of Las Vegas drove to Irvine, Calif., with an Iraqi friend and a cousin to register to vote. They will return on Saturday to cast ballots in Iraq's election.
The treks are motivated by a sense of duty to their home country, Almosawy said.
Almosawy left Iraq almost 25 years ago after Saddam Hussein's regime killed three of his brothers, he said, but his relatives still in Iraq are helping him to select the political entity he will vote for.
Another Las Vegan, Mohammed Thomad, a U.S. citizen and structural engineer, said making a truly informed selection is the biggest problem he is having with the election.
Thomad, who moved to the United States in 1982, initially had not intended to vote in the Iraqi election because he did not know enough about the 111 political entities on the ballot. But he changed his mind and traveled with his wife and children to Southern California to register, and this weekend he will return to cast his ballot there, he said.
To be eligible, Thomad needed two forms of identification proving he was 18 years old by Dec. 31, 2004, and that he was of Iraqi descent. Anyone of age who was born in Iraq, had a father born in Iraq, or who still has or once had Iraqi citizenship was eligible to register, according to election rules determined by the Iraqi electoral commission.
"I was very impressed with the way they had it set up," Thomad said. "But I'm still having difficulty finding information on the candidates."
Thousands of Iraqi expatriates in the United States who were eligible to vote in Iraq's national assembly election this weekend did not register to do so, election officials said Thursday. In person, absentee voting begins today in five locations in the United States and in 13 other countries.
About 11 percent of an estimated 240,000 eligible Iraqi expatriates living in the United States registered to vote in the election, according to figures released by the Iraq Out-Of-Country Voting Program, which was authorized by the Iraqi government to run the absentee voting.
According to Stephen Lennon, an external relations officer with the voting program in Washington, D.C., 3,903 of the 25,946 expatriates who registered to vote in the United States registered in Irvine, Calif., the nearest registration site to Las Vegas, about 300 miles away.
Worldwide, 280,303 expatriates of an estimated 1.2 million eligible expatriate voters registered in a total of 14 countries, Lennon said. In the United States, Iraqis also registered to vote in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Tenn., and Washington, D.C.
The out-of-country voting, estimated to cost $92 million, is being paid for by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, which has received $40 million in funding from the U.S. government, $40 million from Japan and $38 million from the European Union, a press release issued Jan. 5 by the U.S. State Department said.
The out-of-country voting program was established by Iraq's electoral commission only weeks before voting was to take place. Officials with the program called it the largest, most-complicated, in person, absentee voting program ever, in part because they had very little time to organize it, Jeremy Copeland of the voting program said last week.
Polls are open beginning today through Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The California polling station is the El Toro military facility in Irvine.
Because the out-of-country voting program was organized under a tight deadline, many people who would have liked to have registered were not able to do so, several would-be voters in Las Vegas said.
Those who would make the trip twice were highly motivated to have their voices heard, Lennon said.
"People who wanted to do it, did it; and it was great," he said, referring to voters who registered.
Voters can select only one political entity from among the nine coalitions, 74 independent political parties and several individual candidates on the ballot, the State Department said. Then they may have to wait up to several days to learn the results.
The election will determine the makeup of Iraq's new national assembly, which will have 275 seats. The seats will be filled by a system of proportional representation, meaning the percentage of votes a political group receives will determine the percentage of seats in the assembly that group will get.
The goal is to have at least 25 percent of the seats filled by female representatives, the State Department said.
When it is established, the assembly will write Iraq's new constitution and select a council that will, in turn, select a new prime minister for the country. Once the constitution is approved by the Iraqi people in a national referendum expected in October, the assembly will dissolve and new elections will be held, the State Department said.
About 14 million Iraqis living in Iraq are eligible to vote on Sunday, according to the State Department. But threats of violence may prevent many of those voters from going to polling stations, Iraqis in Las Vegas with relatives in their home country said.
One Iraqi expatriate in Las Vegas, who asked not to be identified, said several of his relatives who are ethnically Sunni -- Iraqi elites -- have been kidnapped in recent months. One cousin appears to have been killed.
"Life is becoming so difficult, so harsh, especially in Baghdad," the Iraqi Las Vegan, an economist, said.
He said the polling station in California was too far from his home for him to consider traveling there twice to vote. However, his daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, will vote, he said.
"I would have loved to have voted; I have the documents," the economist said, "But I'm going to have to miss out on the chance."
The economist noted that those Iraqis living in the United States who do vote this weekend are likely to cast a vote for a moderate political party. These voters were likely to cast a ballot in line with what the U.S. government wished for the country, he said.
"The majority of Iraqis who left Iraq were disgusted with Saddam Hussein's regime," he said. "They're pro-Western and liberal and more likely to vote for pro-Western and liberal parties."
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