Congo: Pessimism grips Congo with elections in disarray | The Independent

Campaigning in the Democratic Republic of Congo lurches to a riotous and uncertain finish this weekend, with authorities warning that rain could still delay a historic vote in sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest country.

Should it go ahead, Monday’s vote will pit the young incumbent Joseph Kabila – whose father toppled dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – against elder statesman Etienne Tshisekedi, hailed as the “father of Congolese democracy” and standing for president for the first time.

Namibia: It is time for introspection for the Electoral Comission of Namibia |Informante

The Electoral Commission in Namibia (ECN) has proven to be a farce in the last ten years judging from allegations and counter allegations of vote rigging, including ballot stuffing. At the centre of the controversial ECN is the credibility of the commissioners, who are bipartisan and biased in favour of the ruling class.

The recent Informanté exposé of a commissioner appointed with fake qualifications, but who even made if to the shortlist of the successful candidates, served as the straw that broke the camel’s back. An investigation points to a deliberate endeavor to have a commissioner who could be bought and sold, with an appropriate profile, to collaborate in one way of the other to sway the election results in favour of the powers that be.

Philippines: Comelec, DOJ to resume probe on vote rigging in 2004 polls | The Philippine Star

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) joint panel will resume its investigation and find necessary evidence to pin down other personalities involved in rigging the results of the 2004 presidential elections.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes yesterday said the poll body and the DOJ will continue with the inquiry into the electoral fraud. “Tuloy-tuloy na ito dahil walang temporary restraining order. Lilipat na kami sa 2004 (The investigation will proceed since there is no TRO. We will shift now to the 2004 polls),” he said.

Uganda: Jinja Woman MP vote for recount | monitor.co.ug

The High Court in Jinja has set November 29 to December 2 for the recount of votes for Jinja Woman MP seat. The resident judge, Ms Flavia Anglin Ssenoga, made the ruling following a successful election petition filed by the former Woman parliamentary candidate Maureen Kyalya Walube, challenging the election of Agnes Nabirye as Jinja Woman MP.

Ms Walube’s application for a vote recount was first made in April but was trashed by Jinja Chief Magistrate Amos Kwizera, who was not convinced by the submissions. The ruling by the chief magistrate prompted Ms Walube to petition the High Court alleging a number of anomalies that transpired in the February 18 polls.

Liberia: Opposition denounces poll as ‘fraudulent’ | BBC News

The parties, which include candidates in second and third place so far, said the National Election Commission has manipulated vote-counting in favour of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Partial results show Mrs Sirleaf leading, but short of the majority needed to avoid a run-off vote. And the election commission later rejected the opposition charges. It has until 26 October to announce the final results.

Under the rules, if no candidate scores an overall majority, a run-off between the two front-runners will be held early next month. The opposition say they will not accept the result if counting goes on.

An opposition statement said: “We wish to notify the Liberian people of the massive fraud being carried out by the National Elections Commission in the handling and reporting of the presidential election results in favour of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the Unity Party.”

Belarus: Protesters in Belarus call for fresh and free elections | Deutsche Welle

Around 1,000 protesters took the streets of the Belarusian capital, Minsk, on Saturday to demonstrate against the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko and his handling of the country’s worst economic crisis in years. The protesters rallied in the center of Minsk where they called on the government to halt price inflation, free political prisoners and hold free elections.

“Lukashenko has led the country into a political and economic catastrophe,” rally organizer Viktor Ivashkevich said. Minsk has sought to devalue its currency, the ruble, in order to make its exports cheaper and boost its struggling economy. The devaluation, however, has pushed up food prices. Last month, the government lifted restrictions on food prices altogether.

Yemen: Defected general accuses Saleh of fraud in presidential election, government officials deny | xinhuanet.com

The Yemeni defected general Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar on Monday accused President Ali Abdullah Saleh of rigging in 2006 presidential elections, which was denied by government officials. “I accompanied Saleh in his electoral campaigns in 2006 until the results were ready to be announced,” defected Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar told a press conference at the headquarters of his military base, the First Armored Division.

“And before the declaration of the true final results, Saleh told me that the computer mistakenly counted the votes showing that the opposition candidate Faisal bin Shamlan won. But he ( Saleh) said the counting process was reviewed and declared his victory,” al-Ahmar, who defected from Saleh and joined the protest movement in March, told reporters. “So, Saleh lost his legitimacy because he changed the results of 2006 presidential election by force,” al-Ahmar said.

United Kingdom: Labour slam plans to reform voting system | Birmingham Mail

Labour have slammed plans to reform the voting system to prevent a repeat of the massive fraud which led to Birmingham being called a “banana republic”. Harriet Harman, the party’s deputy leader, said the proposed changes were a Tory plot to stop people voting. She was speaking at Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, which ended yesterday.

The Government wants to change the rules following a high-profile court case in 2005 when Judge Richard Mawrey said election cheating in Birmingham would “disgrace a banana republic”, as he dealt with five Labour councillors guilty of vote rigging.

The Electoral Commission, the official body responsible for overseeing elections, called for an end to household registration, which allows one person to fill a form demanding polling cards for a number of people.

UAE: Handful of FNC candidates demand recount | The National

Twenty are happy, 430 less so. They are the candidates in Saturday’s FNC elections who failed to win the voters’ favour during two and a half weeks of hard campaigning. Seven of them, all of whom stood as candidates in Ras Al Khaimah, are asking for a manual recount.

“We are going to contest this,” said Yousif Al Ghalili, a member of the Shehhi family – one of RAK’s biggest mountain tribes. His 414 votes were fewer than he expected.

“I am quite popular among my community, and just alone through family and friends that number should be at least double,” he said. He met the RAK election committee yesterday to see what could be done. Now he and six others plan to head there again today with a petition outlining their grievances.

Zambia: Sata Holds Lead in Presidential Poll | VoA News

Partial results from Zambia’s presidential election show main challenger Michael Sata holding a lead over incumbent Rupiah Banda.

The Electoral Commission of Zambia said Wednesday that with ballot counting still in progress, Sata of the Patriotic Front party had captured about 42 percent of the vote.  Banda of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy was second with 35 percent. Hakainde Hichilema of the UPND party was third with 18 percent.

… Scattered incidents of violence were reported Tuesday in the capital, Lusaka, but European Union election observers say the vote was conducted in a “correct” manner.  EU chief election observer Maria Muniz described the election as fair and transparent.

Congo: Clashes in DR Congo over ‘voter fraud’ | Al Jazeera

Police in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, have fired tear gas to disperse several hundred opposition supporters who accuse the electoral commission of fraud in the run up to elections later this year.

The protest is the latest sign of growing tension in Congo before presidential and parliamentary polls in November, the second set of elections since the last war ended in 2003. The demonstrators accuse President Joseph Kabila’s party of rigging polls in his favour by allowing for the multiple registrations of voters ahead of the elections.

Colombia: Cali election official removed from post amid growing corruption scandal | Colombia Reports

The Director of the Cali Registry Office has been removed from his position in response to a corruption scandal that has engulfed the Cali mayoral election. Hollman Ibañez was removed after he was accused of corruption by Rodrigo Guerrero, the mayoral candidate who had been taken off the ballot for allegedly collecting fraudulent signatures.

According to Caracol Radio, unofficial sources have also suggested Ibañez influenced the decision not to endorse the petitions of Guerrero and fellow candidate Susana Correa. However, Ibañez will now take on a new role as Director of the National Civil Registrar. He will be replaced in Cali by Dr. Jose Ignacio Cordoba Delgado.

Canada: Elections Canada lobbies for test of online voting | CBC News

The head of the agency in charge of federal elections says it’s time to modernize Canada’s elections, including testing online voting and ending a ban on publishing early election results. In a report on the May 2 election (pdf), released Wednesday, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand writes about his plan to test online voting and encourages parliamentarians to update the Elections Act. Improvements to the electoral process, Mayrand writes, will depend on changes to the law.

“Elections Canada has reached a point where the limited flexibility of the current legislation no longer allows us to meet the evolving needs of electors and candidates,” Mayrand reports. “We look forward to working with parliamentarians as we prepare for the 42nd general election.”

See also – Readers’ Responses: Would you trust your vote to a computer?

Afghanistan: Some lawmakers to lose seats after IEC election review | AlertNet/Reuters

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Thursday said it will remove some, but not all of the 62 parliamentarians whose victories were thrown out by a special court set up by a decree from President Hamid Karzai.

The special poll court’s June ruling rejected results for 62 lawmaker seats, or about a quarter of the 249-member assembly elected in a fraud-riddled poll in September of 2010, raising the prospect of a standoff between Karzai and the parliament. The tribunal carried out recounts and dismissed the 62 on grounds of alleged voting irregularities. The IEC, which ran the foreign-funded election, at first opposed the tribunal’s decision, but last month said it would review it.

Afghanistan: Thousands protest over Afghan vote rigging row | gulftoday.ae

Afghan lawmakers and thousands of their supporters took to the streets of Kabul on Tuesday to protest at the latest twist in a row over fraud in elections last year, officials said. Afghanistan is currently gripped by what experts say is a constitutional crisis over the results of the fraud-tainted parliamentary elections in September last year and how many lawmakers should be disqualified as a result.

President Hamid Karzai last week ordered the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to resolve the long-standing dispute and it is expected to announce within days its decision on how many members of parliament will be kicked out.

“There are about 3,000 people, members of parliament and their supporters demonstrating around the parliament building,” Hashmat Stanikzai, a Kabul police spokesman, told reporters.

Afghanistan: U.N. pushes risky plan to resolve Afghan election impasse | MiamiHerald.com

The United Nations is quietly pushing a plan aimed at healing a rupture between President Hamid Karzai and the opposition-dominated parliament that threatens to ignite a full-blown constitutional crisis, two international officials said.

The proposal, however, risks inflaming the feud and triggering charges of foreign interference with the country’s electoral commission, which is supposed to be independent but has had its credibility battered by two successive fraud-marred national elections.

The U.N. is pressing the commission to overturn for alleged fraud the results of 17 of last year’s 249 races for parliament’s lower house, the officials said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The number is far fewer than the 62 contests that Karzai wanted reversed, but stops short of granting opposition lawmakers’ calls for no changes at all.

Voting Blogs: How easy is it to rig the outcome of a New South Wales Australia Electronic Election? | Poll Blogger

Question need to be asked “Just how easy is it to rig the NSW Legislative Council election? The reality is its quite easy if you have access to the data file and no one else has copies of the data so a comparison cannot be made.

The NSW “Below-the-line” preference data fiels that habve just been released exclude preferences recorded as being informal. Votes where a preference has been omitted or duplicated. This could be as a result of a data-entry or voter error. Without access to the missing data it is impossible to verify the quality of the data recorded.

What’s even more scary is that if a person had access to the original data file they could easily run a simple query against the data set, removing preferences for a given candidate where that candidate has a higher preference than another candidate. The number of primary votes would still be the same but the ballot paper would exhaust during the count if the preference order had been altered in any way.

Saint Kitts and Nevis: Federal leader pledges support for Nevis administration | Antigua Observer Newspaper

A day after Joseph Parry and his Nevis Reformation Party (NRP) were returned to office following Monday’s elections on Nevis, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas pledged the federal government will continue to work closely with the sister isle’s new administration, a government statement here said, even as protests over Monday’s poll continued.

“You have elected a government to look after the interest of the people of Nevis. My duty as the leader of the Federal Government is to lend support whenever that support is required,” said Douglas in brief remarks as Premier Parry and his cabinet were sworn in at a public ceremony at Elquemedo Willett Park in the Nevisian capital, Charlestown.

“Today, I yet affirm that you can depend upon me and the St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party Government to do at all times what is right for the people of Nevis and what is right for the people of St. Kitts as well,” he added.

Armenia: Chief Armenian Election Official Hopes To Stay On | ArmeniaDiaspora.com

A senior official who administered Armenia’s last national elections acknowledged on Monday that he would like to head the new Central Election Commission (CEC) which will be appointed by President Serzh Sarkisian soon. Garegin Azarian expressed such hope after presiding over the last meeting of the outgoing CEC. The 8-member body conducted the February 2008 presidential election which was marred by opposition allegations of vote rigging and followed by deadly street unrest in Yerevan.

The CEC will be disbanded in accordance with a package of amendments to the Armenian Electoral Code that were enacted  by the authorities in May.The most important of those amendments relates to the formation of various-level commissions holding national and local elections. Until now, the president of the republic, a high court and the political forces represented in the Armenian parliament have each appointed one member of those commissions.

Malaysia: Malaysia braces for pro-democracy street protests in Kuala Lumpur | The Guardian

Malaysia is bracing for an Arab spring-style stand-off on Saturday, when activists angry at “dirty politics” are expected to rally in Kuala Lumpur despite draconian government efforts to nip the movement in the bud.

Tensions have mounted in this normally staid state, often called “Moderate Malaysia”, after a group of 62 non-governmental organisations known locally as Bersih 2.0 proposed a peaceful protest, dubbed the “Walk for Democracy”, against alleged vote-rigging and other electoral abuses in a recent state election.

But the government last week declared Bersih – which means “clean” in Malay – illegal, and has warned that anyone wearing the yellow colours of protest will be detained. It has already arrested more than 200 supporters and organisers on charges ranging from the promotion of “illegal assembly” to “waging war against the king”. Some are being held for an indefinite period without trial.

Pakistan: Azad Jammu and Kashmir polls: Tribunal formed to address complaints | The Express Tribune

The Azad Jammu and Kashmir Election Commission formed a tribunal to address what it expects will be many complaints by candidates relating to the June 26 Legislative Assembly polls, even as it denied charges of rigging in the polls.

A spokesperson for the election commission said that the tribunal would be a faster mechanism for dealing with petitions likely to be filed by many of the losing candidates. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) has already begun filing cases alleging rigging in the AJK elections and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) is reportedly considering a similar move.

However, even as it formed the tribunal, the Election Commission spokesperson denied that they had been involved in any vote rigging.“No incident of casting fake votes or any unlawful use of influence upon the polling staff was reported in any of the constituencies,” the spokesman said.

Pakistan: Azad Jammu Kashmir elections: Balloting ends amidst accusations of rigging | The Express Tribune

Balloting has ended for Azad Jammu Kashmir elections across the country amid violence and rigging allegations. The vote count is currently ongoing.
The elections sparked widespread violence with reports of two people being killed in Mirpur and Muzzafarabad.

Also in Lahore, voting for LA-37 was cancelled by the Election Commission after workers of the PPP and PML-N clashed with each other.

More than 2.9 million voters were expected to take part in the elections. In Lahore, 13 polling stations were set up and at least 600 police officials were deployed to provide security to up to 6,000 voters in the city.

Burkina Faso: Burkina Faso Government Plans to Dismiss National Electoral Commission | Bloomberg

Burkina Faso’s government will dismiss the country’s electoral commission following the June 8 resignation from the panel by representatives from opposition parties, said Jerome Bougouma, minister of territorial administration and security.

Benewende Stanislas Sanakra, an opposition leader who lost a presidential election to incumbent Blaise Compaore in November, has been calling for the resignation of the commission’s members since that vote, alleging fraud.

The government “could not remain indifferent” to the demands for the panel’s dismissal, Bougouma told reporters in Ouagadougou, the capital, today. The state will introduce a bill at the National Assembly to approve the resignation, he said.

India: Opposition to raise Electronic Voting Machine issue | The Telegraph Calcutta

The Opposition has decided to raise the issue of using electronic voting machine (EVM) at the daylong 7th Regional Consultation for Electoral Reforms here tomorrow. The regional consultation, organised by the Centre and the Election Commission on how to strengthen the electoral system, will be held at NEDFi House here.

The AGP and the BJP will make a strong case for its outright abolition at a gathering which would include Union law minister Veerappa Moily and chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi.

… AGP’s Arun Sarma … said they want the EVMs replaced as anything “manmade” can be “tampered with”.

Moldova: Communist MPs allege election fraud | Morning Star

Communist MPs and their supporters rallied outside parliament in Chisinau on Thursday over alleged irregularities in elections which gave a boost to the country’s ruling pro-European Union coalition.

Protesters chanted: “Down with the Central Election Commission” and “Down with the Alliance,” referring to the governing three-party Alliance for European Integration (AEI).

The election commission says that the AEI won about 57 per cent of the vote in local councils last Sunday, while the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) took nearly a third of the vote – more than any other single party.

 

Bangladesh: Samyabadi Dal says yes, Janata League no to electronic voting in Bangladesh | The Daily Star

Bangladesher Samyabadi Dal ML yesterday supported introduction of electronic voting e-voting system in upcoming general election while Krishak Sramik Janata League opposed it saying the system is not enough to prevent vote rigging.

Leaders of the two parties expressed their opinions in seperate dialogues with Election Commission EC at its secretariat in the city as part of its ongoing dialogue with 38 registered political parties till July 14.

EC launched the dialogues on Tuesday for opinions on key issues like use of e-voting machine; Representation of the People Order; laws on demarcation of constituencies and appointment of election commissioners. Both parties stressed on the need for establishing a free and powerful EC to conduct a neutral election.

Australia: Key witness for Pauline Hanson a no-show in election challenge | News.com.au

A key witness in Pauline Hanson’s legal challenge to the New South Wales election result has failed to show up, prompting the state’s Supreme Court to consider issuing a warrant for him to appear. The former One Nation leader ran as an Independent in the March 26 election but missed out on an Upper House seat by just 1306 votes.

She claims she was cheated out of 1200 votes that were put in a pile of blank ballots by “dodgy staff” at the NSW Electoral Commission. She is challenging the count, based on alleged email exchanges between the NSW Electoral Commission’s chief information officer Ian Brightwell and communications manager Richard Carroll.

However, the man who alerted her to the alleged emails, Michael Rattner, failed to appear in court today, and until he does his existence is in doubt. “I’ve either been cheated out of a seat or this is a very elaborate hoax,” Ms Hanson said today before attending the hearing before Justice Peter McClellan.

South Africa: Independent Electoral Commission dismisses vote-rigging claims in South Africa Free State | SABCNews

The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in the Free State has once more dismissed allegations that votes were rigged at ward 10 in Tseki village, in Qwaqwa, in the eastern part of the province.

The final results of the elections revealed that the ANC had won two of the three polling stations in the Tseki village.

The Dikwankwetla Party of South Africa (DPSA) claimed there were irregularities in the vote count saying that extra ballot papers were smuggled into one of the polling stations.

China: Grassroot elections show path best suited for Chinese democracy | GlobalTimes

Authorities in South China’s Guangdong Province recently reported 12 typical cases of voter fraud in local village elections since 2008. Candidates tried to rig the elections by buying votes, tampering ballots and even grabbing ballot boxes to prevent people from voting.

Differing from Western practice, China’s democratic experiment has adopted a bottom-up path. Village elections, first launched in 1987, have prevailed nationwide since the early 1990s.

Some liberal scholars simply describe China’s democratization as copying the Western model, and fail to observe the specific conditions of the nation. Just like other countries undergoing social transformation, China has seen its own problems in its experiments with democratization.