Khartoum, April 25: European Union election monitors said on Sunday they were concerned about the manual compilation of ballots by Sudan’s election commission, saying it could undermine the transparency of the polls.
EU observers are monitoring the count in Sudan’s first multi-party presidential elections since 1986.
The EU election observation mission “expresses its concern about the current aggregation of results,” it said in a statement.
Results provided by polling stations to regional bureaus have been “in many cases incomplete or incorrectly reconciled making it difficult to enter them in the computerised results management system,” the mission said in a statement.
The National Election Commission (NEC) has asked its regional bureaus to compile votes manually “without the benefit of the necessary safeguards which were built into the computerised system,” the observers said.
Ballot boxes are in theory meant to be returned to the NEC’s 25 regional offices, attached with a form indicating the constituency number and the number of voters.
But if the form is returned incomplete, the results are then compiled manually and avoid the electronic system which can identify dubious results, such as when ballot boxes have more ballots than voters.
“This would not guarantee accuracy and transparency of the aggregations and would thus undermine the integrity of the whole electoral process,” the observers said.
But the NEC retorted that there was no question about the transparency of the process.
“There is nothing to doubt in the results, all the information is on our (internal) system and can be made available if anyone requires,” senior NEC official Al-Hadi Mohammed Ahmed told reporters in Khartoum.
Some 16 million registered voters had been asked to vote from April 11 to April 15 in presidential, parliamentary and state elections.
The electoral commission has been announcing results as they become available from the votes which are likely to see victory for veteran President Omar al-Beshir.
—Agencies