Few Iraqi expats register to vote in elections

Only about 16% of eligible Iraqi voters living outside their country have registered for next weekend’s elections and the largest turnout so far has been in Iran, organisers said.

Only 9% of the 188,091 Iraqis who had registered as of Saturday were from the United States, while 22% were in Iran, an overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim nation.

Shiites also comprise the majority in Iraq and are expected to fare well in the elections, raising concerns among some Iraqis and Americans that candidates could align themselves with Iran’s hard-line theocracy.

The International Organisation for Migration, which is co-ordinating the expatriate vote, extended the registration deadline by two days.

The reason for the low overall registration remains unclear, but fear of violence or reprisals by Saddam Hussein loyalists may have caused many Iraqis to skip the election, particularly in countries that border Iraq such as Syria and Jordan, where insurgents are suspected of operating.

June Chua, spokeswoman for the Iraq Out-of-Country Voting Programme USA, said the process has been slowed by bad weather, the long distances that many Iraqis must travel to get to a polling place and short registration hours, which officials extended by two hours a day last week.

Some Chicago Iraqi expatriates also said they don’t plan to vote because they are opposed to the election.

Laith Al-Saud, a social sciences professor at Harold Washington College in Chicago, said he thinks the election is illegal because the interim government that organised it was appointed by an occupying power.

“There’s this sort of general assumption – even among those who plan to vote - that (interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad) Allawi is going to win because he’s the US’s guy,” Al-Saud said.

Al-Saud added that the thousands of candidates running in the election has left voters confused. “They don’t know who is running. They don’t know who to vote for,” Al-Saud said.

In Jordan an estimated 6% of 180,000 expatriates have registered and in Syria an estimated 4% of 250,000 Iraqis were signed up.

In the Jordanian capital, some of the Iraqis waiting in line at registration centres refused to be photographed or give their names to reporters. Many said they fear that Iraqis who oppose the vote may recognise them.

Scores of Iraqi policemen who were training in Jordan also arrived to register in buses decorated with billboards of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi’s election campaign. An Iraqi embassy spokesman in Amman, Jordan, said the government was not trying to influence the election and was only providing transportation to registration centres.

To assure reluctant voters, the International Organisation for Migration has put up posters and flyers in the city’s main squares, promising all information about voters will be confidential.

Apathy may be another reason for those who choose not to vote, Jordanian political analyst Raja Talab said, pointing out that many Iraqi expatriates are poor and have never participated in an election.

Peter Erben, IOM project director, said he hoped the Iraqis who had already registered would be “joined by many more Iraqis for this historic opportunity to reshape the future of Iraq”.

In the United States, only 16,794 of an estimated 234,000 Iraqi expatriates have registered at sites in five cities. In Iran, 41,088 of approximately 81,000 Iraqis have registered at six sites, most in the Shiite holy city of Qom.

Absentee voter registration has been watched closely since it may indicate turnout rates for Iraqis voting in the country’s first election since Saddam was ousted.

Erben said an “enormous public campaign” was underway worldwide to inform Iraqis about the election.

The programme had seen increased registration turnout in recent days, with numbers jumping from 25,605 on Thursday to 37,970 on Friday, then 56,524 on Saturday. There are an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi expatriates worldwide.

Host countries for the vote are Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iran, Jordan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

Iraqis who live outside the host countries may travel at their own expense to a participating country to register and vote.

To register, Iraqis have to document their identity, Iraqi nationality and birth on or before December 31, 1986. They must then return to the same location to vote.