[Chris Stein] Polling in Guinea’s presidential election ended Sunday evening. Voters were choosing between giving President Alpha Conde a second term, or replacing him with one of seven opposition challengers.
While looting and clashes between rival political supporters erupted in Guinea earlier in the week, there was no sign of trouble in Conakry as the polls opened. The head of the African Union delegation monitoring the vote, Dileita Mohamed Dileita, called voting peaceful.
He says that based on what he saw today, the elections took place under very good conditions.
Guinea’s opposition parties decried the election as fraudulent. Saturday evening, leading opposition candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo told VOA he had no confidence in the electoral commission. He said he and the six other opposition challengers would reject the polls if they believed they were rigged.
In Conakry’s Kaloum neighborhood, some polling stations had closed by the 6pm cutoff time. But others were still filled with voters waiting to cast their ballots. Fodé Sanou, the presiding officer of one of the polling stations where voting was still onging, said he had to extend voting hours by 90 minutes because of issues with the voter list.
This list wasn’t in alphabetical order, he says. So in order to find a voter, we had to go name-by-name through the list. That’s what caused the backup.
Preliminary results are expected later in the week.
VOA
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