Perfect elections are rare and in Sierra Leone we could be content with a free and a fair election.
In the last Sierra Leone presidential election Christiana Thorpe had to invalidate a few thousand ballots - because they were invalid.
Every mistake that's in the book was evidenced in the Egyptian presidential run-off , in some areas more people voting than were registered, in other areas hundreds of pre-stamped ballot papers for this and that candidate, many cases of naturalised Egyptians voting before they were entitled to do so, even mistakes in counting ballots.....
Yesterday afternoon sometime after 1500 hrs. it was quite tense not only at Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt as the nation listened to the extended preamble to the announcement of the winner of the Presidential elections run-off . It was necessary to systematically go through all the electoral commission's analysis of how the results were arrived at - to pre-empt the kinds of mass/ massive reaction that could erupt spontaneously from whichever side was going to be declared the loser. The results were only announced after painstakingly subtracting the 800,000 ballots that were invalidated - it was then much safer to announce that Muhammad Morsi had won by approximately 900,000 votes...
