Bamako, Mali — The already slow counting of votes after Sunday's first round presidential election in Mali was hit by a further obstacle late Tuesday, when the Rally for Mali party (RPM), which is fielding candidate Ibrahim Boubacar Keita or "IBK", one of three leading contenders, denounced the way results were being processed and validated.
The results are coming in from polling stations all over the vast Saharan nation by radio communication, phone, fax, and via the Internet. The numbers are fed through the Territorial Administration ministry, which organised the poll, and are then handed to the Central Counting Commission. Representatives from all 24 presidential candidates are represented in the Commission.
The RPM Secretary-General, Seydou Keita, flanked by commission members from at least five minor parties, told journalists they could not accept the discrepancies they had seen between results arriving from polling stations via the Internet and others from the same polling stations arriving by phone, fax and radio communication.
Keita told a hastily convened news briefing that the correct results should be firmly established by the Commission before any results were made public.
Keita told reporters that his party, along with the others, was therefore dissociating itself from any published election result which they considered the product of a faulty process.
But he stressed that this did not mean that the RPM, or the other supporting parties, were withdrawing from the Commission, which validates the presidential election results.
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"We are taking this stand as a matter of principle," he said.
Keita denied that this was a preemptive move by his party to prepare for the defeat of its candidate and insisted that it was simply a case of ensuring that the poll was credible and transparent.
Some 48 hours after Sunday's election, Malians were still waiting on Tuesday evening for significant provisional results.
All day Tuesday, the Ministry of Territorial Administration was promising to publish results, but by 22h00 local time (and GMT) no formal announcement had been made.
Earlier, in a press release, IBK's party had expressed deep concern about what it called the slow pace of vote processing and publication of results.
The party urged vigilance and warned against any attempt at manipulation or rigging of the vote.
Late Tuesday, Ismaila Yoro Dicko, in charge of information at the ministry, again pledged to release "very important" results "very soon".
Dicko said the Commission's laborious counting and validation process was partly due to the presidential candidate's representatives at the count who, he said, were understandably demanding that nothing was left to chance.
Ibrahim Boubacar Keita or IBK, a former prime minister of Mali, who defected from the government and ruling Adema party of the outgoing president Alpha Oumar Konare, is one of three candidates thought to be the front-runners in the presidential contest. The others are Soumaila Cisse, the Adema candidate, and the retired general Amadou Toumani Toure, known as "ATT".
