For the 1st time in mod­ern his­tory some spir­ited Iraqis trav­eled 500, 1000 & even 2000 kilo­me­ters, just to have their name counted, just to have the priv­i­lege to be part of cre­at­ing the 1st true Iraqi Right to vote. Some may have trav­eled thru snow­storm, just to reg­is­ter. Even though the reg­is­tered num­bers look dis­mal, 25% of the esti­mated 1.2 mil., but these few high spir­ited Iraqis proved a point.

Mis­man­eg­ment by IOM

Greed over pow­ered the Duties & the Objec­tives of the IOM (Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion), still some Iraqis made the point & set unprece­dented his­tory les­son past 5 days. IOM got $92 mil­lions, whereas the job is not cost­ing them $20 mil (where is the rest of the money??) see my cal­cu­la­tion below. Reg­is­tra­tion admin­is­tra­tors told me in the reg­is­tra­tion cen­ter that they got the election’s ads, posters and book­lets from the IOM just a week before the reg­is­tra­tion started.

Most of the costs goes to the temp. Employ­ees which been hired for a month, salary was given only in the West­ern hemi­sphere ($3000), if we had, let’s say 5000 assigned for Europe & North Amer­ica, you will find it to be just a mare $ 15 mil­lions per month, The rest of 10 third world coun­tries like Iran or Syria with aver­age salary of about 20% of my esti­ma­tion, which is about $600 and if you dou­ble the num­ber of Staffs to 10 thou., this will give you a mare $6mil.
his is a total of $21mil.
Even if you dou­ble the dura­tion time to 2 months, it I still a mare $42mil.

$92–42= $50million [SHOW ME THE MONEY] ?

In a small coun­try like Hol­land (4 hours dri­ving from the far north to the far south) there are 3 reg­is­tra­tion cen­ters, the dis­tance between each cen­ter and the other are 50–60 Km but in a big coun­try like Swe­den there is only 1 reg­is­tra­tion cen­ter in Gote­borg which is 800‑1000 Km far from Stock­holm. They set 5 pol­ing Sta­tions in the US with nearly 250,000 eli­gi­ble Iraqis. Whereas they have 11 sta­tions in Jor­dan & 12 in Iran.

In every elec­tion there will be peo­ple too late, too busy, too far. How many times can we make excep­tions?, we must demand from the IOM Offi­cials to extend this reg­is­tra­tion drive through the vot­ing period of Jan­u­ary 30.

Use­ful links

1– Inde­pen­dent Elec­toral Com­mis­sion of Iraq

2– Iraq Foun­da­tion

3– Iraq out-of-country vot­ing system