Voting process of December 20th: scores of issues on the verge of creating electoral disputes

The presidential elections’ round two, cast together with the one way legislative elections on December 20th were both littered with structural problems and failures of many sorts, which were yet formally held as not significant enough to jeopardize the results’ reliability. The Electoral Commission’s agents happened to be overwhelmed on the ground. Decisions and solutions had to keep up with the issues’ diversity.

Electoral Register
It was known from scratch that the electoral register extension expected to make up for the gap noticed during the presidential elections’ first round would not have been able to massively tipp the scales. The Electoral Commission was in for a settlement which was miles away from settling the issue. This extension merely included recorded voters having their electoral cards in hand and mistakably kept out of the register, whereas the real issue was about the failure to record a much larger number of voters at all. The Electoral Commission’s president does not mind, and stoically draws satisfaction from the extension: “as for the number of voters, we drew close to match the INSTAT’s figures”. On the ground, some polling stations did not bother to take the extension in account at all.

Ballot shortages
How on earth could polling stations located at the heart of the Capital city Antananarivo possibly run short of ballots? …bearing in mind that the local voter turnout been as low as 50%, in addition to that? This is absolutely demented. Yet… in a certain polling station of 800 recorded theoretical voters, local officials had to require presidential elections ballot supplies from an electoral commission’s agent to make the numbers. “No way. You still have a pack to finish off. First I supply the other station which is out of ballots and wait for an Electoral Commissioner to come forth and restore our stocks”. In the end, not even 400 voters were allowed ballots to cast their vote with.

Signature
The voting process cannot be held as complete as long as a voter fails to sign thrice in a row. The issue was this time around the failure to convey the right lists at the right time to the right place. But the voting process was not interrupted “for so little”. The Electoral Commission subsequently calls upon the concerned voters to recover their respective polling stations again, and proceed to sign the previously missing third list. No matter what, this blunder is very much likely to give way to confusion and entail disputes before the Electoral Court.

End of work
Voters, ye be warned, make sure to appear before 17:00. Polling stations were basically supposed to shut doors at 17:00, as directed by electoral regulations. Many of them did not. The obedient polling station agents gathered the electoral cards and strictly rejected late arrivals after 17:00. Some other actually shut their doors and simply went about their business without taking the latest queuing voters in consideration. And some others just left their doors wide opened to late voters for lack of personnel supposed to proceed to the next steps.

Vote counting process
To some voters, marking the single ballot actually turned into the opportunity to take their stand of course, then, unequivocally give a piece of their minds. Supporters of presidential candidate Jean Louis Robinson and the Ravalomanana political sphere won the cup of the most originally illustrated ballots. Were they aware at all that their vote could have been invalidated by so doing? Debates are currently following their course to determine how acceptable the ballots having something else on but an “x” would be. This regulation interpretation issue remains anyway a lesser problem than scratched off or wrongly filled up reports.