Thankfully, we don’t live in fear of terrorist attacks during our upcoming Community Senate and Student Union elections, and we also won’t hear about it on the nightly news. Yet the end results of these elections also will be far less visible than what many in Iraq are hoping for after going to the polls on Jan. 30. “If all we have to do is mark a ballot paper to survive grenades, explosives, kidnapping and killing by terrorists, then so be it,” Zakaria al-Ahmar told The New York Times. Al-Ahmar was one of only a few Sunni Arabs that voted in the Iraq elections, despite the boycott by Sunni clerics.

Nearly 36 percent of the votes have been counted as of Feb. 4, leaving the Shiite party United Alliance in the lead with 2.2 million votes of the already counted 3.3 million. The results came from ten of Iraq’s 18 provinces where there is a strong Shia majority, according the BBC.

The United Alliance, backed by Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, also garnered most of the absentee ballots, which came in from 14 countries, the Associated Press reported. The absentee ballots were handled by the International Organization for Migration.

Led by former expatriate Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the United Alliance maintains that although it has many clerics vying for office, it is not interested in instituting Islamic law, according to CNN.

Despite violence and opposition to the election by the insurgents, there was a high voter turnout on the Jan. 30 election. According to the BBC, Mosul amongst other cities had had a shortage of ballot papers. Election officials sent a team of investigators to Mosul to determine the problem.

“We received some complaints and the legal department in our commission is studying these complaints thoroughly,” said Safwat Rashid, an election commission official, according to the BBC.

Many Sunni Muslims have complained that they were denied to vote in Mosul and elsewhere. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni clerical organization, has called the elections “illegitimate”, saying that “these elections lack legitimacy because a large segment of different sects, parties and currents with their influence in Iraq boycotted.”

Prior to the elections, Sunni clerics maintained that the election must be boycotted. But many did not actually boycott the vote, especially those in Mosul, where only about 10 percent of the population, including Sunnis, voted according to The New York Times.

“In the beginning a lot of Sunni people here boycotted the idea of voting. Then some agreed to vote,” said Mohsen Abdel-hamid, a resident of Mosul, “It was an individual decision. When we saw that things were going smoothly, a lot of people came and then called others to come.”

In some neighborhoods, many would-be voters were intimidated by those opposed to the election. One, the neighborhood of Arab Zuhur, saw only two people vote.

Many in Mosul also voted in crowds, far from where they lived, for fear of retribution by insurgents, The New York Times reported.

“I made sure to vote in a crowd. I found out I am not the only one who did that,” said Muhammad Hussein, an electrical engineer and resident of Mosul.

Zakaria al-Ahmar, a 33-year-old shop keeper in Mosul disregarded the threat from insurgents, and voted in his own neighborhood.

Bombs won’t go off, people won’t boycott it, but many expect there won’t be any problems in the upcoming Senate and Student Union elections.

“I’m sure there won’t nearly as much controversy in our elections,” said junior Daniel Bullard-Bates.