Numerous newspapers in the Knight Rider chain ran a story about some 260,000 expatriates in the U.S. who voted in the Iraqi election, helping to influence the outcome. Joseph Kassab, an instructor at Wayne State and the president of the Chaldean National Congress, said his group mounted an aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign and provided buses to bring voters in the United States to distant polling centers. He estimates that about 6,000 of the approximately 10,000 Iraqis who voted in Michigan were Chaldo-Assyrians. U.S. census figures show there are 51,000 Chaldo-Assyrians in the United States, about 30,000 of them in the Detroit metropolitan area.