AKRE, Kurdistan Region - Hours before polling stations opened on Wednesday, cars tore through Akre’s hillside roads with excited young men poking out of windows, blaring horns and bellowing at anyone who would listen.
Yet the cause of this public spectacle was Real Madrid’s resounding victory over Bayern Munich in the semi-finals of the Champion’s League football. Party politics, by contrast, proved a thoroughly civilized affair.
On voting day these football fans joined the rest of the town to cast their ballots in the region’s provincial elections. Hours before the polls closed, 82 percent of eligible voters in Akre had cast their ballots, a figure that would make most “mature” democracies in the west blush.
Cars filed into this city of 75,000 residents from the countryside and beyond, many coming from as far away as Erbil and Duhok to vote in Akre, where they were officially registered.
Campaigning had officially ended and the day was a holiday, which many people turned into family reunions to chat and enjoy relaxed meals with ink-stained fingers.
“One of our voting machines broke down and people had to wait about 40 minutes for a new one to arrive,” said the director of the Electoral Commission in downtown Akre. “Also, there was a man who forgot his ID card. He drove back to his village and returned to vote.”
These are the kinds of banal problems Iraq’s Kurds are happy to have after civil war, genocide and decades of persecution by the former Iraqi regime.
Dlan Ramazan Aqrawi, a local lawyer recruited by the commission to oversee a schoolroom converted into a polling station, disappeared behind a voting booth with an old woman, returning with an apologetic expression.
“I only help them vote if they specifically ask for assistance,” he explained. “Some can’t read or write, so they need someone to find candidate numbers and fill out ballots.”
Five young men, each with a different colored lanyard hanging around the neck, sat in the room as election monitors. Four were sent by their parties, and the fifth represented the Peace Generation Network, an organization representing over 50 Iraqi NGOs.
“We mostly watch out for the little things,” said Sohaib Idris Xidr, wearing a brown lanyard to signal his Islamic Union Party. “We have been trained to watch for people lingering around, strange behavior. But so far there’s no trace of any fraud. Lots of husbands and wives vote together, but that’s normal.”
He then turned to his fellow monitors from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and the Change Movement (Gorran), who readily nodded in agreement.
Chances of electoral fraud were reduced with the introduction of a new polling system. Voters inserted a personalized card into a small machine that matched their name to their ballot number and issued an electronic receipt confirming their vote.
Representatives of the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization stood outside the station to make sure voters were not coerced, and no campaigning was going on.
Occasionally, remnants of a more complicated past were still visible. A little further away from the school, a PUK candidate stood with a group of men and eight heavily armed guards in camouflage. He exchanged a few words with two PUK monitors before taking off with his entourage.
“He just comes to prevent problems, making sure no supporters are working up any trouble,” explained some men nearby.
Fazil Halaq Aqrawi, a local barber, had opened his shop, he said, in order to help out-of-towners find the polls.
“Because they just announced the speaker of parliament and promised to form the cabinet on Sunday, people are relaxed and happy, much more optimistic about the government. They’re definitely coming to vote in greater numbers,” he said.
Sameer, another barber who works part-time as a bus driver, had been hired earlier in the day to collect dozens of Christians and Arab refugees from Mosul and take them to a special polling station for internally displaced persons (IDPs).
“The KDP paid me to pick these people up, but we never asked for their party affiliation. It’s really been a wonderful day for our country,” Sameer beamed. “I never remembered so many elections, ones that actually felt free.”
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