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Sierra Leone: Tight race expected in Saturday’s Presidential election
While Koroma is seen as the favorite, Bio has garnered significant support and the vote is expected to go to a run-off.
Koroma, 59, came into power in 2007. While that election was marked by several incidents of violence, they were followed by a peaceful transfer of power between the ousted Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and the APC.
While eight parties are contesting the presidential vote, these two parties have led the political scene since independence.
The election marks the first time the Sierra Leone government is bearing most of the poll costs, as well as the first time presidential, parliamentary and local elections are being held simultaneously.
An initiative called National Election Watch has set up a network of more than 9,000 observers around the country. From a “Situation Room” in Freetown an 18-strong team will monitoring screens containing live data from polling stations.
Coded SMS (text messages) reports will flag up fraud incidents, voter demographics, turn-out, and send out unofficial results from individual polling stations as they are counted.
