LA's Iran Ballot box closes due to protest 

 

Los Angeles, Jun 18 (AP) -- Iranians living in the United States voted in their homeland's presidential election despite protests that shut down a poll site six hours early.

Election workers in the Los Angeles suburb of Commerce - one of 36 U.S. cities where voting took place Friday - closed the site after a confrontation between demonstrators and security guards. No arrests were made. 

 

Iranian-Americans Aryo Pirouznia, far right, and Firouzeh Ghaffarpour, middle, both with the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, (SMCCDI) protest against a fellow unidentified Iranian-American citizen, left, after he voted in the Iranian presidential election Friday, June 17, 2005, in the Los Angeles suburb of Commerce. Los Angeles was one of 36 U.S. cities where voting booths were set up for people born in Iran or born to Iranian parents. Protesters urged Iranians to boycott the voting. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

 

 

It was not immediately known how many people voted in an industrial area that is known as "Tehrangeles" for its large Persian population. (*)

Opponents say the election is a sham because the president and parliament can be overridden at will by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, head of the non-elected Islamic theocracy.

That didn't stop Amir Ravanbakhsh, 26, from voting, even though his parents in Iran planned to boycott the election.

"It's my right," said the biotechnology scientist, who came to the United States seven years ago.

The greatest concentration of this country's roughly 400,000 Iranians live in Southern California. The single polling place at the Commerce Plaza Hotel was picked to avoid protests, an election monitor said.

Still, a handful of demonstrators were doused with pepper spray by hotel security guards. Hotel officials asked poll workers to leave about six hours early.

Elsewhere, Hadi Kamyab, 25, who came to this country to study civil engineering, cast his vote at the Islamic Institute of New York in Queens. He said he favors change in his home country but rejected calls for a boycott.

"You must be patient," he said of Iran's slow creep toward a more open democracy.

Voters checked a list of candidates posted on a wall then gave a fingerprint before filling out a paper ballot and dropping it in a box.

In Boston, Sara Sarkhili, 26, said she considered not voting to protest the limited number of candidates but cast a ballot to "pass my voice on."

In Milwaukee, Shahbaz Shahbazi, 38, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen who runs a consulting business, said many of his friends boycotted the election.

But Ali Dadpay, 30, founder of the Persian Cultural Association at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said, "It's not a time to leave the field and let the radicals have their way."

In the days leading up to the election, television and radio stations in this country that have been critical of the regime beamed their message into Iran by satellite and Internet.

The word also was spread by activists such as Nasrin Mohammadi, 28, a recent immigrant who says her brothers were imprisoned, starved and beaten so severely their feet split open and toenails fell off after their 1999 arrest for leading Iran's student movement.

The Bush administration, which has criticized Iran for its nuclear ambitions and said the government sponsors terrorism, calls the election illegitimate, in part because many reform candidates were denied a chance to run.

(*) SMCCDI Note: Less than 50 individuals, including Ultra-Islamists, participated in the ballot box organized at Crown Commerce Hotel of Los Angeles, while, most of the half a million Iranians of southern California are living in this city.