The Daily Star, Lebanon
May 30 2005

Third district elections go ‘smoothly’ despite absence of voters

By Rym Ghazal and Leila Hatoum
Daily Star staff
Monday, May 30, 2005

BEIRUT: Beirut’s third district polling stations lacked the
participation of groups known to be abstaining from the elections,
while other stations received a rush of voters early in the morning,
trickling down to just a handful by the end of the day.

Armenian Tashnag Party voters abided by their party’s calls to
boycott the elections, with only 183 out of an eligible 7,128 voters
casting their ballots at the Armenian Evangelic School.

By closing time, some of Beirut’s polling stations had seen up to a
50 percent voter turnout, cut equally across gender and the various
religious sects.

Third district candidate Mohammad Qabbani, who is running on Hariri’s
list, told The Daily Star he believed the elections are “democratic
and transparent,” and said he’d been treated as a regular citizen
while voting.

Nazik Hariri, the widow of assassinated Premier Rafik Hariri, also
voted in the third district and said she wished her husband had been
“here to head the electoral campaign.”

Candidate Ghinwa Adnan Jalloul, also running on Hariri’s list for the
third district, said the elections were “well organized and there was
no need to pressure anyone to vote for Hariri’s people as so many
voters have come to the polling stations cheering for him and his
people.”

Most of the voters interviewed, whether aged 90 like Toufic Alwani,
or 25 like Rola Mohammad, came determined to vote for Hariri’s list –
with some wishing they were voting for “the man himself, Rafik
Hariri.”

Behind the scenes were the diligent pairs from the EU Election
Observation Mission (EU EOM), sent to Lebanon earlier this month to
observe the polls, along with an independent Canadian team, “the
first of its kind in Lebanon,” according to the team’s leader,
Senator Mac Harb.

“We have had complete access to everything and it has been a smooth
ride so far, and hopefully it will be the same case for the rest of
Lebanon,” said Harb.

Similar approval was given by EU observers Gerald Kristianson and
Stephano Valentino.

Valentino commented on the issue of the uncontested winnings of some
candidates in Beirut, saying: “Democracy is supposed to give
everybody the opportunity to elect the representative they find fit.”

He said he was “interested” in the recent events taking place in
Lebanon and felt the country “is making a good effort to make things
work in the right way.”

As for poll violations, Nora Mrad, one of the LADE (Lebanese
Association for Democratic Elections) observers confirmed some
violations had occurred.

One instance she cited was the lack of curtains or sufficient
barriers to vote behind in some of the electoral stations, as well as
finding lists of candidates behind the curtains which might affect
the voters’ decision.

Mrad said there had been no facilities for the handicapped and in
most of the electoral stations there had been insufficient access,
with many of Lebanon’s disabled unable to climb the numerous
staircases.

Meanwhile, Hayya Bina, a group that aims to transform Lebanon’s
confessional system into a secular one, was hard at work on Beirut’s
streets urging people to vote with a special ticket calling for a
secular country, along with their chosen ballots.

Sadly, the effort failed to attract much attention.