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http://snipurl.com/cdqp The Iraq Election Primer In the first of a series of dispatches from Baghdad, David Enders lays out an essential guide to the Iraqi elections. January 24 , 2005 Note: Introducing MotherJones.com's Baghdad Journal. Over the coming weeks, as Iraq prepares for -- and recovers from -- its Jan. 30 elections, reporter David Enders will be filing regular dispatches from Baghdad for MJ.com. Today he kicks off with an essential guide to the elections. What are Iraqis voting for? Iraqis are electing a 275-member national assembly that will in turn select a president and a committee for drafting a constitution. (Oddly enough, many Iraqis are not so sure why the old one needs to be totally scrapped � it actually enshrines many of the rights we hold dear in the U.S., and Saddam never amended it; he just went around it.) They will also vote for local councils in each of the 18 governorates; and in the autonomous Kurdish region, a 105-member parliament will be elected. Who are the candidates? There are 7,471 candidates running under 111 parties. (As many as 50 parties have dropped out of the race in the past few weeks, either in opposition to the elections or for fear of assassination; but they remain on the ballots, which have already been printed.) The seats in the assembly will be filled proportionally � that is, if Party A's list gets 50 percent of the votes, it fills 50 percent of the seats. The parties expected to fare best are the United Iraqi Alliance, headed by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and comprising members of various Shiite groups that stood in opposition to Saddam Hussein's government and the Iraq List, headed by U.S.-appointed prime minister Ayad Allawi. (Allawi, it seems, is genuinely popular amongst many of Baghdad's secular middle class for his presumed willingness to play hardball in the service of bringing stability to the country.) Many Iraqis admit they can't name too many other candidates or members of parties besides their leaders. Many of the parties have not released their full candidate lists for fear of assassination. (At least four have already been killed.) The Independent Election Commission of Iraq (IECI) has stated that it cannot force any of the parties to release their lists and that it will not release do so itself. Therefore, it is quite possible for voters to elect someone they didn't know was running. Is anyone campaigning? Not really. There are a lot of posters up in certain parts of Baghdad but they mostly identify the heads of parties who were already identifiable. As commercial television and other traditionally western modes of marketing are largely new to the country and affordable to few, Allawi is virtually the only candidate who appears regularly on television, though Hakim, through the magic of his own satellite channel, also frequently appears on television. Why are some groups boycotting and what effect will this have? There are a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that the country is still occupied by a foreign power. The boycott is popularly discussed as an action by the Sunni minority prompted by fear of losing the power they have held over the Shiite minority since the days of Ottoman occupation, but this is not necessarily the case. There are a number of influential Shiite clerics, including Jewad Al-Khalasy, the leader of the secular Iraqi National Conference, who have taken issue with the US military's refusal to discuss its withdrawl, as well as the powers held by the election commission, which include the ability to delete any candidate from a party list. The elections will also be a test of strength for anti-occuption cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr, whose Medhi Militia fought US troops from March to May and then again in the fall before he agreed to a shaky cease-fire in September. Sadr isn't running and supports a boycott, but he hasn't called for one for fear of retribution from the US military and to avoid directly contradicting Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the ranking Shiite cleric in the country who has issued an edict, or fatwa, urging people to vote. (Other groups have issued edicts against voting.) Some Iraqi pundits are predicting as many as 70 percent of those eligible to vote won't, either out of fear of violence or as an act of protest. How, logistically, will Iraqis vote? And how does the government plan on assuring security for those who do? There will be nearly 6,000 polling stations across the country. Guerillas have made claims that they know the locations of many of the polling centers and have already damaged a few, though the locations of the polling centers will not be announced to the general public until the morning of the vote. A member of the resistance I spoke to earlier today confirmed infiltration of the election staff. Vehicle traffic will be restricted on the day of the election to government officials, US and Iraqi security forces and journalists. (It seems to me that this could help to reduce voter turnout considerably, since many Iraqis do not necessarily live in the neighborhood where they are registered. There will be wide cordons around polling centers to guard against car bombs, and inter-governorate travel will be banned on the day before, the day of, and the day after elections. Iraq's borders and airports will be closed for the same period and an extended curfew (8 p.m.- 6 a.m.) will be in effect. (This, however, simply formalizes the hours most Iraqis are keeping anyway at this point.) The ban on inter-governorate travel, as well as the closing of borders and airports, seems rather dubious � I doubt anyone drives a truck bomb very far before reaching their target, and announcing such closures weeks in advance only means that anyone who is determined will be position. Also, the US military has failed to close Iraq's borders before now, I doubt they'll suddenly figure it out. My resistance pal admitted it would be very hard for guerrillas to launch major attacks on polling stations if the cordons are as wide as expected. But for those who do vote, the real danger might be when they go back outside those cordons. In any case, the Ministry of Health has doubled the number of available hospital beds in Baghdad in preparation. What do Iraqis have to say about voting? (Remember that voter turnout in the U.S. is often less than 50 percent, so let's drop the condescension.) "I'm going to vote for whoever my friends or family vote for," said one guy in Sadr City. "I'm going to vote because Ayatollah Sistani asked us to," another said. Many are too busy dealing with the travails of everyday life - supporting their families, etc., to care. How will the elections be monitored? Though it's been reported that there will be no international observers, IECI spokesman Fareed Ayar claims there will be about 120 of them. (Presumably they'll be in the Green Zone, which means their presence will be about as valuable as that of the international monitors who plan on working from Amman, Jordan.) There will be 12,642 Iraqi observers. Are Iraqis living abroad allowed to vote? Yes, though registration by Iraqis abroad -- more than a million are eligible -- has been lower than expected. Considering that many of those eligible left the country more than two decades ago, I'm not really sure why it's thought so surprising that turnout wasn't that high. So if things are so screwed up, how come the elections are going forward? A few months ago, many of the major parties were urging a postponement of elections and some say Allawi even agreed to it before changing his mind the next day, apparently at the behest of the Bush Administration. This is narrow view � the Bush Administration is not nearly in control as that. As one of my colleagues put it, "Sistani is driving the election bus." What will happen after the election? Well, stay tuned. My best guess is that once a new government-in-hiding has officially been chosen, its leaders, with the help of the U.S. military, will continue fighting an insurgency that is growing and whose appeal will likely be enhanced by widespread disenfranchisement. The government might also fall to some pretty serious infighting as well, especially if Hakim's list comes out on top, setting up a showdown with Sadr. Womidh Nidhal, the former political science chair at Baghdad University and the spokesman for Khalasy's party, is no fan of Allawi's, but admits his "election" might be the country's best hope against breaking wide open immediately. (Nadhmi, in an aside, confesses to finding it hard to believe the U.S. would allow a party with close ties to Iran, -- that is, Hakim's -- to win the election.) The most frightening implication of low turnout is that whoever shows up to vote is electing the federal government for the entire country. It's as if, say, only voters in Red States showed up to vote in a U.S. election, but were allowed to elect all of Congress. David Enders is a 24-year-old freelance journalist who has spent more than a year reporting from Iraq since the end of the invasion. 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