Friday, December 3, 2010

Stolen elections in Cote d'Ivoire (Breaking!)

Wow--it looks like President Gbagbo outright got his friends in the Conseil Consitutionnel to steal the election for him. This is huge, absolutely huge.

The second round, between incumbent Gbagbo and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara was held last week. Elections were supposed to be announced by the Independent Elections Commission by Wednesday but it missed the deadline. Yesterday, the Commission had announced (as the NYT/AP reports) 54.1% for the opposition leader and 45.9% for Gbagbo (the President is in year 1o of his first five year term after, I think 6 delays in elections).

But the Conseil, which is headed by a Gbagbo supporter, invalidated the results, saying the deadline was missed. Today, it announced that it was chucking out 500,00 votes, giving the incumbent victory--by 51.4% of the vote-- despite the fact that:

Those results — which were considered credible by the African Union, the United Nations and the White House — gave opposition leader Alassane Ouattara 54.1 percent of the vote, compared to 45.9 percent for Gbagbo.

It argued that Gbagbo supporters had been intimidated and that those votes were invalid...Meanwhile, the opposition leaders won what observers called a fair elections in neighboring Guinea and Blaise Campaore was "re-elected" in Burkina Faso...

Stay tuned, this could get really bad.

4 comments:

  1. Is bad and will get worse...I'll update later but shots were fired around Abidjan last night and Gbagbo got himself sworn in at noon local time. So is about to get a lot worse should cover it.

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  2. You said Gbagbo got his friend in the courts to rule in his favor. Obviously, it is very inconvenient to say that the Independent Electoral Commission was stacked with Ouattaras supporters, and headed by a Ouattara loyalist, who sneaked away from the rest of the Commission to proclaim provisional results in the HEADQUARTERS of the Ouattara campaign to a FOREIGN press. Don't let the truth bite you on the butt.

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