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Opposition, monitors report irregularities in Bahrain vote

23 October 2010 20:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Thousands of Bahrain voters went to the polls Saturday in parliamentary and municipal elections, with two leading opposition groups and local monitors expressing concern over what appeared to be voting irregularities, APA reports quoting Earth Times.

The groups reported a case of an estimated 1,000 voters who allegedly were barred from casting ballots because their names had disappeared from the original voter registry.

Also, they noted the deployment of anti-riot police at the entrance to and inside villages before and during the voting, as well as varying degrees of willingness by polling stations to stop violations and enforce voting regulations.

Abdulnabi al-Ekri, head of the Bahrain Transparency Society, said the group’s monitors also witnessed suspicious activity at the polling station set up on the King Fahad Causeway, linking Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

He said voters were brought in on buses and veiled women were allowed to place ballots without having their identities checked against the identification they provided.

"Most of the violations we documented the night before and half- way through the voting day were concentrated in the northern and central governorates where there are opposition candidates running," al-Ekri said.

He added that the group had presented the findings to the supreme election committee.

Sources in the Islamic Shiite al-Wefaq, the largest of the opposition groups, said that in one district alone names of some 400 registered voters disappeared from the voting registry.

Their pan-Arab ally in the opposition coalition, the National Democratic Action Society, Waad (Promise), said that halfway through the day they had countedmore then 150 such cases in districts they were running in.

Anger within the opposition over the incidents reached even its top leadership, with Sheikh Isa Qassim, the spiritual leader of al- Wefaq - who had pushed for Shiite participation - declining to comment to media after casting his ballot.

Supreme election committee officials meanwhile downplayed the figures of missing voter names as claimed by the opposition.

"There were few such insignificant cases. The blame lies with the voters because they did not check the published registry that was posted online and in the centers from September 21st till the 27th," Judge Khalid Ajaji said.

The election is taking place amid an on-going security campaign targeting the far-right opposition, with the trials of a number of activists set to begin next Tuesday.

More than 318,000 people were eligible to vote for 127 candidates vying for 35 seats in the 40-member parliament, the lower house of the bi-cameral National Assembly. Seven of them are women.

Voters were also selecting 40 other representatives out of 171 candidates, three of whom are women, to fill municipal council positions. Two candidates in that race have already won uncontested.

Five parliamentary candidates have already secured their seats, including the only female member of the last parliament chosen in 2006, Latifa al-Gouda.

Results of the vote are expected to be announced early Sunday.