Heavy rains have loosed bridges from their moorings and made roadways into seas of mud, but long lines began forming hours before polls opened Tuesday morning in Liberia's presidential run-off vote.
Pitting international soccer super-star, George Weah, against international civil servant, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the election has been widely regarded as a potential turning point. Nearly two decades of political strife have left the country's infrastructure in tatters and produced a generation reared on violence.
An estimated 250,000 people died in the fighting, and more than three-quarters of the country's citizens were forced from their homes. Over 20,000 child soldiers, some as young as seven, were pressed into service by rival factions, including former governments. The number of girls forced into sex slavery was uncounted.
Only a fifth of the population is literate, and the capitol, Monrovia, has no central electricity or running water. Outside the city, towns and villages are destitute and desperate. A United Nations peacekeeping force of 15,000 has enforced a fragile order, but disarmament of some 95,000 fighters has been under-funded and incomplete.
In the end, a crowded field of 22 candidates came down to a stark choice.
Weah's supporters said his limited formal education was outweighed by his lack of political baggage, his enthusiasm and personal generosity, his service as a UN Goodwill Ambassador, his wealth that could make him immune to the country's corrosive corruption and his appeal to brutalized young men who were forced into gangs and militias and identify with his rags-to-riches saga.
Sirleaf Johnson's backers cite her Harvard education, her experience with economic issues, her service as head of Africa for the United Nations Development Programme, her long campaign for good governance, including chairing a transitional commission last year that attacked continuing corruption, and her support among Liberia's women, who have provided an enthusiastic counterpoint to Weah's youth appeal.
In the final days before the run-off, Weah in an armored Humvee and Johnson Sirleaf in a helicopter barnstormed the countryside, trying to persuade the undecided. With a life expectancy of only 47 years and most of Liberia's 3.4 million people below voting age, the eligible electorate numbers 1.3 million. While some analysts predicted a poor turnout due to voter fatigue and the difficulty of getting to polling places, the candidates fought for every vote, down to the wire.
