Turkey: Presidential candidate queries ballots | Associated Press

Turkey’s main opposition candidate in the upcoming presidential election questioned on Tuesday why electoral authorities are printing millions of extra ballots. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said international observers had noted that about 18 million additional ballot papers were being printed for the vote, the first round of which is on Aug. 10. If no candidate wins an absolute majority, a runoff will be held on Aug. 24. “Of course some of the ballot papers may come to harm. They could be destroyed by rain, floods and mud,” Ihsanoglu said. “But what does it mean to print 18 million extra? Who will use these ballots? How will they not go into the wrong hands? This is what we are asking. Who is responsible?”

Wisconsin: Elections board to consider lifting ban on poll observers using cameras | Wisconsin State Journal

The ban on election observers using cameras at polling locations may soon be lifted in Wisconsin. That move, which was recommended by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is set to be considered Monday when the state elections board meets to vote on proposed changes to election observer rules. If the Government Accountability Board approves the change, observers might be able to use cameras to photograph and record voters and others at polling places by the Aug. 12 primary, including people getting ballots and registering to vote. Earlier this year, Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill allowing observers to get closer to those they are monitoring. The legislation said that observation areas at polling places can be as close as three feet from the tables where voters obtain ballots or register, or from counting locations — rather than the six feet previously required. Observers would need to remain in those areas while filming or taking photographs of voters, and photographing ballots would still be prohibited.

Mississippi: Crazy runoff turns ugly: “Poll watchers” head to black voting sites | Salon.com

The Mississippi GOP Senate race has already been a real … well, it’s been something. Tea Partyers are being arrested for breaking into nursing homes or accidentally getting locked inside government buildings where ballots happen to be held. Poor old Southern gentleman Sen. Thad Cochran has little idea what the hell is going on at any given moment and is relying on lobbyists to pitch pork to voters for him. For the most part, it’s been a quaint, entertaining tribute to old-timey Southern political high jinks. Unfortunately, the last moments of the primary campaign, which concludes in tomorrow’s runoff between Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel, are also closely resembling old-timey Southern political high jinks — only now, the less entertaining parts. The race is getting mighty race-y. Polls of Republican voters indicate that McDaniel, the Tea Party challenger, is likely to pick off Cochran tomorrow. This has been the understood dynamic of the runoff from the get-go. The Cochran campaign and its well-funded backers, therefore, have been appealing to Democrats — which in Mississippi mostly means African-Americans — to cross over and vote for Cochran, who’s done a lot for the state over the years. The rule is that any Democrats who did not vote in the June 3 Democratic primary are eligible to vote in tomorrow’s GOP runoff. The Cochran campaign and affiliated PACs have gone about reaching out to black community leaders.

Mississippi: Conservatives Plan to Use Poll Watchers in Mississippi | New York Times

As Senator Thad Cochran, the veteran Republican, fights for his political life in Mississippi by taking the unexpected step of courting black Democrats, conservative organizations working to defeat him are planning to deploy poll watchers to monitor his campaign’s turnout operation in Tuesday’s runoff election. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars backing Mr. Cochran’s Tea Party opponent, State Senator Chris McDaniel, said in an interview on Sunday that his group was joining with Freedom Works and the Tea Party Patriots in a “voter integrity project” in Mississippi. The groups will deploy observers in areas where Mr. Cochran is recruiting Democrats, Mr. Cuccinelli said. J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and conservative commentator who said he was advising the effort, described the watchers as “election observers,” mostly Mississippi residents, who will be trained to “observe whether the law is being followed.”

Editorials: Playing With Fire in Afghanistan | New York Times

At this pivotal moment for Afghanistan, one of the two candidates for president, Abdullah Abdullah, is creating a political crisis by trying to interrupt the vote-counting in Saturday’s runoff. On Wednesday, he demanded that the election commission stop counting ballots and withdrew his election observers from the process. This could be catastrophic for Afghanistan, which is still very fragile and under grave threat from the Taliban. If no winner is decided, there is likely to be a protracted political struggle along ethnic lines that could make it impossible to transfer power democratically. The uncertainty would paralyze government decision-making and prevent the signing of a security agreement that would allow the United States to leave a residual force in Afghanistan after combat troops depart later this year.

Afghanistan: Candidate’s Protest Clouds Afghan Vote-Counting for President | New York Times

Afghanistan’s presidential election was cast into crisis on Wednesday as the candidate Abdullah Abdullah announced a boycott of the electoral process, accusing his opponent and President Hamid Karzai of engineering huge fraud in the runoff vote on Saturday. Rejecting the process laid out under Afghan electoral law, he called on the election commission to halt all vote-counting and immediately investigate any inflated ballot totals — steps that are designed to come after partial vote results are announced in the next few weeks. Mr. Abdullah also withdrew his election observers from the vote-counting and suspended his cooperation with the Independent Election Commission, which his campaign accuses of bias. If Mr. Abdullah were to reject the official results of the vote, it would cast into doubt an election that Western and Afghan officials alike have considered critical to the legacy of the long Western war in Afghanistan. The election’s legitimacy has been directly tied to the country’s stability, and to continued international aid now that Western troops are leaving.

Ukraine: Monitoring the Election that Brought Billionaire Poroshenko to Power in Ukraine | Forbes

On May 25th, election day in Ukraine, I was with ten other election observers in the town of Romny, one of the oldest cities in Ukraine, founded in 902 A.D., and with a storied history under various rulers including Catherine the Great. Today the town and its surrounding environs have a population of about 50,000. The city is in Ukraine’s northeast, about 60 miles or so from the Russian border, north of the fighting further south in Donetsk and Luhansk. Yet the tension in the air was palpable as we readied the ballot boxes for the country’s first post-Maidan election. I was there to make sure the polls were run according to law, that ballot boxes were not tampered with, that the counts were honest and legitimate, and that the districts were operating according to law. Very often with hand counting, elections are manipulated. My team and I were sponsored by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe both who had vested interests in making sure a smooth transition occurred to a new and legitimate Ukrainian government.

Guinea-Bissau: Guinea-Bissau counts votes after big turnout in crucial poll | Reuters

Vote counting began in Guinea-Bissau after a heavy turnout in Sunday’s legislative and presidential elections meant to bring stability to the West African state after years of coups and political infighting. No major incidents were reported by the close of polls and monitors said they expected a record turnout. The electoral commission said turnout had reached 60 percent by 1430 GMT (10.30 a.m. EDT) but did not give more detailed numbers. At sunset, officials in Pefine, a neighborhood in the crumbling capital Bissau, sat under a mango tree tallying ballots under the watchful eyes of residents and election observers. Results are due by Friday. If no candidate wins an outright majority, a second round will be held between the top two.

Afghanistan: Credibility of Afghan Vote in Doubt as Observers Flee Violence | New York Times

Usually, an Afghan election — a $100 million, Western-funded exercise — draws foreigners to Kabul like flies to honey, with incoming flights full of consultants, international monitors, diplomats and journalists. Not this time. Now, it is the flights out that are full, and the incoming planes are half empty. With the possible exception of journalists, foreigners have been leaving Afghanistan like never before during an election period after a series of attacks on foreign targets and the commission running the vote. An attack on the offices of the Independent Election Commission went on all Saturday afternoon, with staff members hiding in armored bunkers and safe rooms while five insurgents fired rockets and small arms at the commission’s compound, having sneaked into a building nearby disguised in burqas.

Wisconsin: Controversial election bills find little support in Senate | Wisconsin State Journal

Senate Republicans moved three election-related bills through committee last week, removing a controversial provision from one and taking no action on a fourth bill that was criticized by election watchdog groups. The caucus is also balking at other controversial election reforms such as doubling campaign contribution limits, an Assembly-approved bill requiring voters to present photo identification and a constitutional amendment to change the recall process. Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, also added an election reform idea to the mix: ending same-day voter registration; however, he immediately acknowledged the bill had no chance of passing this session. Of 15 election-related bills still under consideration, eight have Democratic support, while the prospects for at least four remain up in the air, said Dan Romportl, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau.

Sri Lanka: Opposition calls for independent electoral commission | Khabar South Asia

The Sri Lankan government is facing calls from both home and abroad to establish an independent electoral commission. In the wake of a Commonwealth report on elections in northern Sri Lanka, leading opposition parties joined a call by Commonwealth election observers for the island-nation to create such an impartial body. Opposition leaders say the government should re-instate the Sri Lankan constitution’s 17th Amendment, which provides for an independent electoral commission. Under the current 18th Amendment, President Mahinda Rajapaksa can appoint a commissioner of his choice, as well as to other positions such as chief justice. “Our party has repeatedly supported the 17th Amendment to the constitution, which makes way for the setting up of a number of independent commissions for elections, police, human rights, judicial services and bribery and corruption,” said R. Sampanthan, leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) party, whose candidate, C. V. Wigneswaran, swept the northern provincial council elections.

Nepal: Maoists Are Routed in Nepalese Election | New York Times

Nepal’s dominant Communist party was routed, the country’s politics swung sharply to the right, and India’s influence in Nepal is likely to soar after the first set of results from last week’s election were finalized Monday. The Nepali Congress, the country’s oldest political party and one that favors close ties with India, won 105 of the 240 directly elected seats. The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) came in second with 91 seats. Despite their party’s name, the Marxist-Leninists are considered centrists in Nepal. The majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly will be determined by proportional votes, and in those preliminary returns the Nepali Congress is again first followed by the Marxist-Leninists, according to the Election Commission of Nepal. Together, the two parties will likely dominate the new Constituent Assembly. Since a two-thirds majority in the Constituent Assembly is required for a constitution to be adopted, however, the Maoists may still play a critical albeit reduced role. The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) secured only 26 seats in the direct election, a small fraction of the total it earned in the 2008 elections.

Hungary: Socialists call for international election observers | Politics.hu

The opposition Socialist Party has called on the government to request the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to send observers to ensure the transparency of Hungary’s general and European Parliamentary elections next spring. Socialist lawmaker Tibor Szanyi said his party suspected that the ruling Fidesz party was “ready to perpetrate election fraud in all 11,000 constituencies nationwide”. Szanyi insisted that at least 1,000 OSCE observers would be needed, one for every 10 polling stations.

Maldives: Off their rockers | The Economist

Just why were the people of the Maldives asked to vote in a presidential election on September 7th? Campaigning and voting went perfectly well. The contest looked fair and free. Your correspondent, visiting both a remote atoll as well as the capital, Male, saw and heard of nothing untoward during the campaign. The independent Electoral Commission and local election observers concluded it had gone off perfectly. The thick flow of foreign ones agreed. (It is presumably easier for the Commonwealth, the European Commission and others to recruit poll monitors for the Maldives than for Afghanistan or elsewhere). The outcome, too, broadly matched earlier expectations. Mohamed Nasheed, a former president ousted in 2012 by what he said, reasonably, was a coup, romped home with 45% of the vote. Just short of winning outright, however, he was forced into a second round of voting scheduled for late September. Yet a handful of power-brokers evidently could not stand the prospect of Mr Nasheed actually coming to office if he had won the second round. First the courts compelled the army and police to stop the second round of voting. Then, whatever 45% of the population have already said, the Supreme Court found an excuse on October 7th to annul the first round of the election.

Zimbabwe: Elections May Be Delayed – For Two Weeks | CFR

The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) special summit on the Zimbabwe elections went ahead on June 15 in Maputo, Mozambique, despite press reports that Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe had sought its postponement. Mugabe had unilaterally proclaimed that elections would go ahead on July 31, as mandated by the Zimbabwean constitutional court. The opposition parties, led by Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T, strongly objected to elections that soon because a package of reforms designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 electoral violence has not been legislated or implemented. SADC, led by South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma, has called for such a Zimbabwe “road map” that would promote free and fair elections. The upshot of the Maputo summit is that Mugabe agreed to ask the constitutional court to allow a delay in the elections for about two weeks. Mugabe also apparently agreed to regularize through parliament some amendments to the electoral act that he had already implemented using presidential powers. In addition, the Zimbabwean security forces are to restate their commitment to the rule of law. SADC further urged the Zimbabwean parties in parliament to agree on legislation concerning a number of proposed reforms that remain outstanding.

Equatorial Guinea: Opposition cries foul after leader’s party sweeps vote | Reuters

Equatorial Guinea’s main opposition movement cried foul on Tuesday after the president’s party announced it had won all but two seats in last month’s parliamentary election in the tiny oil-rich West African state. President Teodoro Nguema Obiang’s ruling Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) won 99 of the 100 seats in the lower house of assembly and 54 of 55 senate seats in the May 26 vote, the government said on its website on Saturday. The Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS) party will be the only opposition group represented in parliament, with one seat in the lower house and one in the senate. “These results have nothing to do with the votes people actually cast,” Placido Mico, secretary-general of the CPDS, told Reuters. “We completely reject these results … This is a real fraud, in total violation of the law.”

Wisconsin: Republicans push for changes to election observer, local recall laws | Chippewa Herald

Election observers could get far closer to the tables where poll workers gather information from voters on Election Day under a bill introduced by a group of Assembly Republicans late last week, which already had a public hearing on Tuesday. At the campaigns and elections committee hearing, lawmakers also considered GOP-authored legislation that would raise the bar for recalling local officials. Under the election observer bill, chief inspectors and municipal clerks would be required to designate areas for observers at the polls that are within five feet of the tables where voters provide their names and addresses, as well as within five feet of the tables where people can register to vote.

California: Misplaced ballots were likely due to human error, elections official says | San Francisco Examiner

An ongoing investigation into 65 ballots that were not found or counted for months after the November election points to human error as the cause, Chief Elections Officer Mark Church has indicated. On April 12, San Mateo County election officials discovered a vault containing uncounted provisional ballots and announced the discovery the next week. Of the 65 ballot envelopes, only 35 were eligible votes, and they did not affect the election results. The investigation launched by Church uncovered that employees placed the ballots inside a covered container within the security vault. As a result, Church said in a statement, the election staff did not see the ballots, which should have been sent to the main elections office for processing, Church said. Although the uncounted votes did not alter the results, they remain a source of concern, according to officials and election observers.

Kenya: Millions Vote in Crucial Kenyan Elections | NYTimes.com

Millions of Kenyans poured into polling stations across the country on Monday in a crucial, anxiously awaited presidential election, and early reports said some violence erupted in the coastal region around Mombasa, recalling far greater bloodletting in the last national ballot five years ago. Across the land, the turnout appeared to be tremendous. Starting hours before dawn, lines of voters wrapped in blankets and heavy coats stretched for nearly a mile in some places. But in Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, at least four police officers were killed with machetes in an overnight attack that authorities believe was carried out by the Mombasa Republican Council, a fringe separatist group that opposes the elections and believes Kenya’s coast should be a separate country. News reports put the death toll higher, with Reuters quoting senior police officials as saying nine security officers, two civilians and six attackers had died. Other reports put the tally at 12.

Virginia: Fairfax judge declines to issue injunction on poll observers | The Washington Post

In the end, even the Fairfax County judge deciding a last-minute lawsuit over the rights of poll watchers on Election Day wasn’t sure what the parties were fighting over. So Judge Dennis J. Smith declined late Friday night to issue an injunction that local Democrats had sought to address what they claimed was an illegal attempt by Republicans to limit party observers — and possibly votes — in Virginia’s biggest Democratic stronghold.

Texas: No problems seen with European election observers | San Antonio Express-News

Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade said Friday that European election observers have caused no problems with the state’s voting process, but she declined to criticize state Attorney General Greg Abbott for threatening them with arrest. Abbott sent a letter Thursday to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, complaining about the presence in Texas of members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Abbott’s letter was the latest round in a public spat that began Tuesday when he warned the group’s representatives to stay at least 100 feet from all polling places and said they would be subject to “criminal prosecution” if they failed to comply with that requirement.

Belarus: Belarus denies visas to two European poll observers | The Financial

Belarus has denied visas to two observers who planned to monitor Sunday’s parliamentary polls in the isolated country for the OSCE mission, Europe’s security and rights body said Wednesday. “Two parliament members from Germany and Lithuania who planned to observe the elections were told they would be denied visas” by the Belarussian foreign ministry, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly said. Visa denials to European lawmakers from international observer missions are extremely rare, and the last time Minsk barred foreign observers was in 2006, said spokesman for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Neil Simon. Simon named the two banned observers as Marieluise Beck from Germany and Emanuelis Zingeris from Lithuania.

Georgia (Sakartvelo): Ivanishvili Says to Accept Georgian Election Results Deemed ‘Legitimate’ by International Observers | Civil.Ge

Leader of Georgian Dream opposition coalition, Bidzina Ivanishvili, said on Sunday that his coalition would accept results of elections if October 1 parliamentary polls were deemed as legitimate by international observer organizations. Ivanishvili, who was interviewed by the Georgian Public Broadcaster’s weekly program Accents, also said that it was President Saakashvili who was interested in having post-election disorders.  Asked whether he would accept election results if those results were deemed “legitimate” by “authoritative” international observer organizations, Ivanishvili responded: “Yes, of course.”

Georgia (Sakartvelo): Russian election observers rejected by Georgia | Democracy & Freedom Watch

Georgia’s Central Election Commission has rejected applications from two Russian organizations to register as observers for the parliamentary election on October 1. September 9, the CEC decided to deny the State Duma of the Russian Federation and Fund for Free Election to register as observers. The rejection comes as a consequence of a recent amendment of the election code with effectively introduced a ban on election observers from any country that fails to recognize Abkahzia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia. Russia has recognized both regions as independent states. The initiators of the law explained that the goal was to “keep away observers that might have a conflict of interest or some kind of agenda. Observers should be politically impartial.” Sergey Markov and Maxim Gregoriev, members of Public Chamber of Russia, were among those whose application was rejected.

Lesotho: Tiny Lesotho holds peaceful election | CSMonitor.com

Lesotho – the tiny mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa, with the best (ok, only) skiing in Africa, and one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates – is getting recognition for something else: carrying out a peaceful election with a likely transfer of power.  After elections held this week, a majority of Basotho voters turned against the 14-year rule of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili, expressing frustration with empty promises. With no party enjoying a convincing majority, five opposition parties this week cobbled together Lesotho’s first-ever coalition government and claim at least 61 seats of the 120-member parliament – with an ex-foreign minister, Tom Thabane, tabbed as the new premier.  With its straightforward process and absence of violence thus far, Lesotho gives a lesson in democracy that many other African countries — such as Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, and even nearby Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and South Africa could learn to emulate, political observers say.

Algeria: Islamists fall to government party in election | KFVS12

Islamists suffered a surprising defeat in Algeria’s parliamentary elections, bucking a trend that saw them gain power across North Africa after Arab Spring uprisings. The three party Islamist “Green Alliance” claimed Friday the results were rigged to keep them out of power in a country that has experienced decades of violence between radical Islamist groups and security forces. The Green Alliance was widely expected to do well, but instead it was the pro-government National Liberation Front that has ruled the country for much of its history since independence from France that dominated the election. The FLN, as it is known by its French initials, took 220 seats out of 462, while a sister party, also packed with government figures, took another 68 seats, giving the two a comfortable majority. The Islamist alliance, which took just 48 seats, less than in the last election, said the results differed dramatically what their election observers had witnessed in polling stations.

Algeria: After improved turnout, Algeria awaits election results | DW.DE

Results of parliamentary elections in Algeria are expected Friday afternoon, after authorities announced better-than-expected turnout in the ballot. Still, fewer than half the potential voters made their voices heard. The government in Algiers reported relatively high turnout in parliamentary elections late on Thursday, a surprise after a campaign that appeared to be marred by voter mistrust and disinterest. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika had billed the ballot as a piecemeal version of the rapid changes taking place in several regional neighbors, referring to it as an “Algerian Spring.” Election observers brought in by Bouteflika reported only minor negative incidents on voting day, while the government was able to announce greater voter interest than initially expected.

Liberia: Election Academy Forum Kicks Off in Monrovia | Liberian Observer

West African Election Observers Network (WAEON) has decided to hold its next academy in Liberia in an effort at help strengthen civil society capacity to engage in post-election reform and development.  This capacity building academy will take place beginning today to Friday at a local resort in Monrovia. The forum opens between 9am and 10am with remarks from the Liberian Democratic Institute (LDI), WAEON Chairman Mashood Erubami, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Gabriel Smith, Chairman of the Elections and Inauguration Committee, House of Representatives.

Armenia: Local Election Observers Fear Risk of Prosecution | EurasiaNet.org

With less than two weeks to go until Armenia’s parliamentary vote, election observers are becoming an issue. Rights activists are voicing worries that a change to the Armenian election code could leave observers potentially vulnerable to defamation suits over statements made about the polling and vote-counting processes. Fifteen observer organizations with a total of 12,778 observers have been registered to monitor the May 6 election, the first national poll since the disputed 2008 presidential vote, an event that was marred by the deaths of 10 people in post-election violence. The changes made to the election code in 2011 were supposed to address inadequacies with the presidential vote three years earlier. One electoral code amendment involved the removal of Chapter 6, Article 30, Section 6, which stated: “Observers and representatives of mass media shall not be prosecuted for their opinions about the course of the elections or the summarization of their results.”

Myanmar: Asean observers invited for April elections | BBC News

Burma has invited foreign election observers for the first time to witness polls, officials from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) say. Asean said that it had been asked to send a total of 23 delegates including two MPs from each member state and media representatives. Analysts say it is a small but symbolic step as the military-backed civilian government introduces cautious reforms. Forty-eight seats in parliament are being contested in the 1 April vote. Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is standing for the first time since 1990, when Burma’s military leaders refused to recognise her National League for Democracy (NLD) party’s election victory.