Secrecy surrounds Iraq vote

"Ayatollah Sistani has said he welcomes the list and if you ask me, that's an endorsement,'' says Mr. Qindeel. "For many Iraqis, it will be enough to know it's Sistani's list. They won't feel the need to know all the names."

Farid Ayar, a member of Iraq's Independent Election Commission, says he's urging Iraq's political parties to disclose all of their candidates' names. "We ask the parties continuously to do this because most voters want to know who the candidates are. But it's not something that's required."

Other matters that are still being worked out are the precise number and location of polling places, security arrangements to protect voters against possible insurgent attacks, and provisions to make it easier for Iraqis to reach the polls in largely Sunni areas of the country, where violence has been highest and voter turnout is expected to be low. Mr. Ayar says there will be between 5,500 and 6,000 polling places across the country, many in schools and government buildings. Polling stations will have an average of five booths. Ayar hopes the locations will be announced to the public around Jan. 22.

On Tuesday, appointed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi acknowledged that violence in Anbar and elsewhere may make it impossible for some voters to go the polls. "There are some pockets that will not participate in the election, but they're not large," he told reporters. Nevertheless, four out of Iraq's 18 provinces are extremely violent, and these provinces are home to about 45 percent of the population, and most of its Sunnis.

"I'd like to vote, but I'll be waiting to see if there are big attacks on the morning of the 30th,'' says Faiza Ibrahim, a Sunni woman who runs a small store in Baghdad.

"There may be some various locations where it is difficult for people to vote," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher at a press conference Wednesday.

According to a senior US Embassy official, recent polling shows that at most 40 percent of Iraq's Sunni Arabs intend to vote, compared with about 80 percent of Shiite Arabs. That is expected to lead to overwhelming Shiite representation in the transitional parliament, which will write Iraq's permanent constitution. In the short term, at least, that is likely to increase Sunni Arab resentment and violence.

"I don't think violence will go down appreciably after the election,'' says the US official. "But what would push the country over the line into civil war would be the determination of one group to lord it over the others." The official says he doesn't think that's going to happen, with indications from Shiite political leaders that they're going to seek to include Sunnis in the drafting of the new constitution, even if they're not well represented in the new parliament.

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