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BAGHDAD, Iraq, - Farid Ayar separated three
pieces of cardboard, folded them along their
prefabricated seams, and assembled a square column a
few feet high with a diagonal brace inside. "Help
me," he said to another Iraqi, and they fitted the
last piece into the top, turning up a flap to make a
little shelf that was shrouded on three sides.
In less than a minute, Mr. Ayar, a member of the
Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, had
assembled a polling booth. He pantomimed a vote by
jiggling his fingertips over a ballot before folding
it and dropping it in an imaginary ballot box.
It looked easy. But if the country is to have its
scheduled elections on Jan. 30, then over the next
11 days Mr. Ayar's organization will have to ship
90,000 of those cardboard kits and 60 million
individual ballot sheets to more than 5,500 polling
places, some of them in the most perilous regions of
Iraq.
From training as many as 200,000 poll workers to
tabulating the choices of about 14 million eligible
voters, the logistical challenges of organizing fair
elections in an unstable country that has not voted
freely since the 1950's have been lost in the wash
of violence and political strife. Election workers
are days away from putting this gigantic machine to
the test in one of the most forbidding challenges to
democratic ingenuity.
"It's the biggest logistics operation that Iraq will
have organized since the war," said Carlos
Valenzuela, the chief elections official for the
United Nations in Iraq and a nonvoting member of the
commission.
And that operation is taking place in a land where
nothing seems to work and office supplies are
coveted. The country is so bereft of the raw
materials of democracy that even the familiar length
of string that keeps voters from taking the pen at
the booth is being shipped to each polling place in
an elections kit that includes duct tape,
felt-tipped markers and candles in case the lights
go out - as they undoubtedly will.
The crunch faced by the elections officials is only
likely to worsen: the voter rolls themselves are not
complete. Originally based on the computerized
rosters for distributing food rations in Iraq, phone
book-style lists are speeding toward 542 district
voting offices, where local citizens may challenge
particular entries and ask that others be added. The
final changes will be made by hand after district
officials rule on each dispute.
Such complexities help to explain why some
politicians, especially Sunni Arabs, at times seem
driven to distraction by the seemingly immutable
date of Jan. 30 for elections that has been set by
the government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and the
American-led occupation.
"Is it written by God, 30th?" asked Aiham Alsammarae,
a Sunni who is the government's electricity
minister, and favors delaying the voting, even
though he is running on the Independent Democrats
ticket. "It is a political decision," he said. "I
don't understand why the Americans don't understand
that."
But other Iraqis say that, even with the threat of
violence, they are thrilled to vote in their first
free election and see no reason for delay.
"We feel that we are free for the first time," said
Mr. Ayar, who is more than 60 years old but declines
to give his exact age. "I can say yes and no. There
was no yes and no before." Election preparations
"are with the schedule," he said. "There is no delay
on our side." If the vote goes on as planned, then
on Jan. 30 Iraqis in 15 of the 18 provinces will
have two ballots: one for a 275-member Transitional
National Assembly and one for their local provincial
council. The three Kurdish provinces in the north
will also vote on an assembly for the Kurdish
region.
The National Assembly will choose a president and a
prime minister, and will write a constitution.
The election commission began its quest last year
with an imperative to create voter rolls, rapidly,
in a nation with no tradition of such electoral
niceties. Commissioners quickly settled on the
so-called public distribution system, or
food-rationing rolls.
Although some people ridiculed the system as riddled
with fraud and inaccuracies, comparisons with the
most recent Iraqi census revealed striking results,
said Mehdi M. Alalak, director of the organization
for statistics and information technology in the
Ministry of Planning. Projections from the census,
Dr. Alalak said, estimated the total population at
27,139,000; using the distribution system, the
estimate was 27,300,000.
In the messy game of counting citizens in Iraq, the
difference was small, suggesting that the
distribution system was basically trustworthy, Dr.
Alalak said. But the roster still had to be cut to
eligible voters.
So until Dec. 15, potential voters were allowed to
amend their entries, and the new data were compiled
electronically by Dec. 31. The lists were printed
and are en route to distribution centers; the last
challenge period is expected to end on Jan. 25.
Then comes election day for the 14.2 million
eligible voters that emerge from this tortuous
process. (An estimated 1.2 million Iraqis abroad
will be allowed to vote.)
Each voter will be assigned to one of the 5,500 or
so polling centers. Each center will house several
polling stations. A given station will be designed
to handle no more than 500 voters on that day.
Each station, of course, will have several cardboard
voting booths.
Queue controllers at the entrance to the center and
at each station will try to keep order and direct
voters to the shortest lines. An identification
officer will check the voters against the names on
the rolls. Another worker will hand out ballots.
The voter will mark at most one box on each sheet,
then fold them, walk to a ballot box and drop them
in. Just before, a ballot box officer, in one of the
most significant steps of the day, will apply a
ruddy indelible ink to one finger of the voter to
prevent him or her from voting twice.
Mr. Valenzuela said that because the mark could
expose a voter to insurgent violence, the commission
considered using ink that could be seen only with an
ultraviolet lamp. But aside from the technical pain
involved, this "invisible" ink was rejected when the
Iraqis on the commission said that establishing the
vote as visibly untainted by fraud was the paramount
consideration - even if the mark depressed turnout.
In terms of the ultimate voter turnout, "there is no
yardstick" for success, Mr. Valenzuela said, except
for legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis.
The polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. As soon
as they close, workers in each center, using a
tightly prescribed protocol, will push tables
together and begin to count. The tables are to be
fastened together with duct tape to keep ballots
from literally slipping through the cracks.
Centers with usable phone and internet connections
may begin transmitting results to the main counting
center in Baghdad, where Mr. Ayar, who is also the
commission's spokesman, will announce whatever he
has to the world's assembled news media. An accurate
count could, however, take weeks, as paper forms
stream in from all the provinces.
Mr. Ayar said that he had not given much thought to
how he would approach a task with no real precedent
in the history of Iraq: announcing the outcome of an
election whose results are not known in advance.
"We will see," Mr. Ayar said, beaming. "It will come
from nature."
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