WP: Obstacles Plague Absentee Voting For U.S. Iraqis

Polls, Personnel Lacking 3 Weeks Before Election

Monday, January 10, 2005; Page A01

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.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61768-2005Jan9.html