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Obstacles plague Iraqi absentee voting
Just three weeks before thousands of Iraqi immigrants in the United States are to cast absentee ballots in their homeland's first national election in more than a generation, efforts to organize the voting here are beset by delays in planning and logistical obstacles. 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 Washington — 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. "There is no information available [about] how people can vote or where," said Najmaldin Karim of Silver Spring, president of the Washington Kurdish Institute. "I think the people who are trying to do this are totally ignorant or incompetent or both." Imam Husham Al Husainy, a Shiite cleric and director of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Mich. — which has one of the largest concentrations of Iraqi immigrants — said he has gotten hundreds of calls complaining about the election arrangements. "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." Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-01-10 |
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