Iraqi parliament approves controversial elections bill

·Iraqi lawmakers on Sunday approved by majority a long-awaited election law.
·The law approved the open list system under which voters can pick individual candidates.
·The law stipulated each of country's 18 provinces will be considered as a single electorate.

Iraqi parliament speaker Iyad al-Samarrai (C) speaks to the press following an Iraqi Parliament session in which a law to govern the country's general elections was agreed upon in Baghdad Nov.8, 2009.>

BAGHDAD, Nov. 8 -- The Iraqi lawmakers on Sunday approved by majority a long-awaited election law which would govern the country's national polls scheduled for January.

The law won 141 votes out of 195 lawmakers who attended the televised session of the 275-seat parliament.

The law approved the open list system, under which voters can pick individual candidates, instead of the closed list system adopted in the 2005 elections, under which they can only pick parties, not candidates.

The law also stipulated that each of country's 18 provinces will be considered as a single electorate.

The Iraqi lawmakers have long been struggling over a compromise on how voting should take place in the northern oil-rich Kirkuk, an ethnically-mixed province of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.

Kurdish lawmakers wanted to see Kirkuk to vote according to the 2009 registry of voters like the rest of the country, but the Arabs and Turkmans were looking with suspicion at the rise of Kurds in the province and therefore they preferred the 2004 or 2005 voters registration.

The new electoral law solved the impasse by suggesting using the 2009 voters registry in Kirkuk and any provincial registry, which should be subject to examination by a committee within a year if there is a suspicion about the numbers of voters.

Iraqi parliament speaker Ayad al-Samarai holds a news conference before voting on an election law at the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad Nov. 8, 2009.

If the committee find irregularities of five percent in any province, then the voting will be abolished and will be held again later.

Abbas al-Baiyati, a Shiite Turkman lawmaker, told reporters that "We hope the electoral commission would do its best and work day and night to meet the deadline of January 16."

Osama al-Nejaify, a Sunni Arab lawmaker from the northern Nineveh province, said "we have achieved a victory by safeguarding the rights of all factions in Kirkuk after we managed to give it a special situation particularly by examining the names of voting registry."

U.S. ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill attends the Iraqi parliament before voting on an election law in Baghdad November 8, 2009.
(Reuters Photo)