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Liberia: Presidential run-off polls open
“I call on those boycotting the poll to ignore the ignorance and show up to vote,” she said.
In a country where more than one-third of adults cannot read, voters were handed ballots showing two sets of photographs.
On one end of the paper was the turbaned and spectacled incumbent Sirleaf, who was first elected five years ago and is seeking a second term. Because the ballots were already printed, Tubman’s photograph could not be removed, but the effectiveness of his boycott was evident in the visibly reduced lines.
Some polling stations had no more than a dozen people waiting their turn. Whereas during the first round of voting last month, voters camped out on the pavement, then waited hours for their chance to cast their ballot, nearly an hour after polls opened Tuesday many of the polling stations in the capital had no one waiting to vote.
Latecomers simply walked up to the doors, showed their ID and were handed a ballot.
The day before the vote on Monday, Tubman’s supporters clashed with police in violence that left at least one dead and four others injured with bullet wounds. Overnight, police stormed two opposition radio stations and shut them down, according to witnesses and employees of the stations.
Tubman said that the violence was further evidence that the vote should have been postponed, but most country experts and analysts say Tubman is boycotting not because of fears of fraud but because he knew he could not win.
“If you look at the figures, you can see that Tubman is almost certainly going to lose. He is 12, 13 points down in the polls,” said Stephen Ellis, the author of a history of the Liberian civil war and a researcher at the African Studies Center in Leiden in the Netherlands. “It’s an obvious calculation. He withholds legitimacy from the government,” said Ellis. “If it was felt by a large part of population to not be legitimate, in a place like Liberia, with its history, it becomes quite worrying,” he said.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
