Mali officials start vote count in presidential poll seen as peaceful

Bloomberg

Election officials in Mali are due to start counting ballot papers after a presidential runoff that observers say was mostly peaceful, even as sporadic incidents of violence broke out in regions where the nation is battling militancy.
Voters decided whether President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita should win a second five-year mandate after securing 41 percent of the votes in the first round on July 29. His main opponent, 68-year-old Soumaila Cisse, got 18 percent of ballots
cast in the initial race and hasn’t been successful in uniting a fractured opposition to back him.
“All stations were staffed, the electoral material was sufficient, and ballot boxes were correctly sealed,” Cecile Kyenge, head of the European Union’s observer mission, told reporters. The EU had observers posted at 300 of about 23,000 polling stations.
In the Timbuktu region in the centre, which is among the hardest hit under a tide of extremist attacks, one election worker was abducted and killed while unidentified people stole ballot boxes at another station, said Boubacar Thera, a spokesman for a regional observer mission. Some voting stations remained closed after armed men threatened voters, said Thera.
The front line in a regional war against extremist whose bombings and hit-and-run attacks are growing more sophisticated by the month, Mali’s failure to quash a fractured extremist insurgency has reverberated across West Africa. While support has declined for the 73-year-
old Keita, who’s popularly known as IBK, analysts say a lack of strong opposition figures who aren’t part of the political establishment has helped him gain votes.
Keita cast his ballot
at about 9 am in the Sebenikoro neighbourhood of the capital, Bamako.
“Now it remains for the Malian people to decide,” he told supporters after voting. “I promise all the difficulties we have experienced over the past years are now behind us.”
Despite growing public discontent with his failure to stem corruption, reverse the spread of militancy,
and create jobs, almost
two-thirds of Malians still approve of Keita’s performance as president, according to a recent poll. At the same time, opposition leader Cisse served long enough in government for voters to be wary of him, said Mamouni Soumano, head of the advocacy organization Malian Center for Dialogue and Democracy.