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Liberia votes: Incumbent only slightly ahead, 2nd round likely
Liberians vote in presidential election
Africa’s only female president who was just awarded the Nobel Peace prize for helping stabilize this war-torn nation led in unofficial results released Wednesday, but the early tally indicates she did not receive the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.
That means that the Harvard-educated Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will likely need to face a second round of voting, which will pit her against the party of a soccer star who just completed college this year.
Official preliminary results are not due until Thursday, but a media consortium that sent observers to a large number of polling stations announced on state radio that Sirleaf’s Unity Party was leading with 127,150 votes representing roughly 48 percent.
With just over 265,679 ballots counted — representing nearly 15 percent of registered voters — the party of George Weah was trailing with around 41 percent. The race’s kingmaker appears to be senator Prince Johnson, a former warlord who videotaped himself torturing this nation’s former president in 1990.
