Paul Bass Photo
Hayfaa Alabdullah and Imad Shaboo piiled into Jane Kinity’s Subaru Tuesday so they could exercise a right they said they couldn’t back in Iraq — voting for their elected officials.
Kinity (at right in photo), who emigrated to the U.S. from Kenya in 2000, was spending Tuesday encouraging people to vote for incumbent Toni Harp in a Democratic mayoral primary. She spoke with a voter alongside Harp and veteran campaign driver Byron Breland outside the Dwight Ward 2 polling station at Augusta Lewis Troup School …
… then headed over to her 2007 Subaru Tribeca for an appointed rendezvous with Alabdullah and Shaboo.
As she navigated Edgewood Avenue and turned onto Garden Street, Kinity spoke of how she knows the couple: Because Kinity speaks Swahili, she began volunteering with Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) to help other African immigrants adjust to life in New Haven. She got to know other immigrants there as well, including Alabdullah and Shaboo, who came from war-torn Basra, Iraq. She takes them to doctor appointments, translates for them at meetings with their child’s teachers. And introduces them to voting. This would be their second election since becoming citizens.
Kinity met them outside their home on Kensington Street, and they piled in the back seat of the Subaru. On the way back to Troup, they looked over campaign flyers. They said it wasn’t safe to live, or vote, in Iraq, which is why they moved her.
Kinity parked in the Troup lot. Everyone got out, and Kinity handed the couple a palm card to scrutinize before going inside to the polls.
“This one? Toni Harp?” asked Shaboo.
“Toni Harp! Yes,” Kinity replied, pointing to a representation of how her the mayor’s appears on the ballot. “There is no picture. You see the name.”
The couple then checked in with poll workers, cast their ballots …
… and emerged with their “I voted” stickers. They wore them proudly as Kinity prepared to ferry them back home.
Thomas Breen Photo
Another Iraqi refugee, Akram York, a 37-year-old Westville resident and Iraqi refugee, went to the polls at Mauro Sheridan Science, Technology & Communications School in Ward 27 to cast the very first ballot of his life. He said he planned to vote for mayoral challenger Justin Elicker.
York (pictured) is a case manager with IRIS. He came to the United States from his native Mosul, Iraq, in 2012 and became a citizen last September.
York hadn’t cast his ballot by the time this reporter spoke to him at around 12:30 p.m., because he, just as several Westville residents interviewed midday by this reporter, had gone to the wrong polling place. A Ward 26 resident, York needed to drive over to Davis Street Arts & Academics School to make that first vote happen. (Mauro was previously the Ward 26 voting spot, not the Ward 27 spot. The Ward 26 station was moved to Davis this year.)
Having spent the first three decades of his life in Mosul, York said, he never even considered voting in any local or national Iraqi election.
He is a Sunni Muslim, he said, and the political infrastructure for most of his adult life after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been tilted towards benefiting Shia.
“We started not believing in voting,” he said. “It was just not safe.”
York said that he planned on casting his first ever ballot for Elicker because of what he hears over and over again from fellow refugees he works with through his job as an IRIS case manager. “I listen to them,” he said, “and all the issues that have with the schools,” an issue Elicker has made central to his campaign.