Up to 230,000 people of Iraqi origin could vote at polling stations set up across the United States in Iraq's national elections at the end of the month, an official behind the effort said today.
Mr Peter Erben of the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM) told a news conference another 150,000 may vote in Britain, the main US ally in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and 250,000 in Syria.
In all, up to a million people outside Iraq may be eligible to take part in the poll to elect a transitional national assembly.
"We are planning polling centres in 14 countries," said Mr Erben who heads the Out of Country Voting Programme (OCV) for the IOM, set up outside the United Nations system in 1951 to aid people fleeing communism in Eastern Europe.
The elections inside Iraq are billed as the first fully democratic poll since the former ruling Baathist party, later led by US-ousted president Saddam Hussein, came to power in 1968 in a military coup.
Iraq's interim government and its American allies insist the poll will go ahead despite a violent insurgency which threatens to scare away many voters. All Iraqis aged over 18 on January 1 can vote, perhaps 15 million out of a population of 26 million.
Mr Erben said the figures of potential Iraqi voters in each of the 14 countries were rough unofficial estimates based on information from refugee bodies, national immigration services and Iraq's embassies and consulates.
"No one can be sure how many Iraqis there are anywhere. When we start registration from January 17, we will get a better idea," said the IOM official, who recently set up a similar operation for exiled Afghans to vote in a president poll.