Monrovia — With vote counting from Tuesday's run-off presidential elections proceeding faster than the first round on October 11, Liberians may learn by the end of the week who they have chosen to lead their nation into peacetime reconstruction and reconciliation.
In a surprise development, the early lead went to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a 66-year old former banker who came in second in the first round to 39-year old soccer sensation George Opong Weah. Results announced by the National Elections Commission (NEC) at an 8 PM briefing Wednesday, Monrovia time, show Sirleaf with a 12-percentile point lead over Weah. With votes from 1,813 of the country's 3,070 polling centers counted, Sirleaf had 293,363, or 56.4 percent, while Weah had 227,244 votes, representing 43.6 percent.
Early on Wednesday, Weah's party, the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), issued a press statement calling on the head of the election commission, Frances Johnson-Morris, to remove herself from the remaining part of the electoral process, accusing her of not being impartial. During a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson-Morris was asked to comment on Weah's claim that he had actually won 62 percent of the first round votes, not the 28.3 percent shown in the official tally. Johnson-Morris responded that the assertion made by the CDC candidate was "reckless." Because this occurred on election day, the CDC contends that this may have affected the outcome.
As the vote count came in on Wednesday, tensions mounted in Monrovia, especially around Weah's compound where the issue of electoral "fraud" was gaining momentum. Callers to talk-shows on the Weah-owned station King FM recounted instances of alleged cheating. Prior to the election, some CDC members had complained to foreign diplomatic missions in Monrovia that the NEC was planning to use a type of "magical ink" that could disappear when used to mark Weah's name on the ballot, a claim flatly rejected by commission officials.
In the results reported thus far, Sirleaf received her strongest support in her native Bomi County, where she got 17, 082 votes out of a total of 23,476. As expected, Weah did very well in Grand Geddeh, where, with 82 percent of the votes counted, he received 18,229 against 711 for Sirleaf. However, the gains in Grand Geddeh may have been offset in Nimba where Sirleaf leads with 17, 286 against Weah's 5,312. River Cess County was evenly divided with Sirleaf receiving 3,409 against 3,309 for Weah.
In Maryland, where Sirleaf got only 16.5% in round one, she is leading with 8,351 votes compared to Weah's 6,306. In Grand Capemount County, where Varney Sherman dominated in the first round, Sirleaf has a 25-point lead, even though Sherman campaigned strongly for Weah in the region. The contest is much tighter in Montserrado, the county that includes Monrovia and has the largest voting block, where Sirleaf's lead is less than 13 points. With tensions mounting, the United Nation Mission in Liberia deployed troops at strategic points around the capital, including Weah's campaign headquarters and Sirleaf's residence.
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Meanwhile, on Wednesday, both the United States Ambassador to Liberia, Donald Booth, and the chief mediator in the Liberian peace process from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, expressed satisfaction with the way the election was conducted. In a statement, Alan Doss, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Liberia, also praised the electorial process and appealed to the candidates "to urge their supporters to be patient in waiting for the results and to accept the results peacefully."
