bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 14–17
It’s likely that I learned parliamentary elections would be held in Mali the same way most Malians did, through a text message inviting me to find out what my polling station was. The first message came a week or two before the vote, and a year and a half since a coup d’état brought to an end one of Africa’s most enduring democracies. In 2012 a group of army officer had removed the previous President, Amadou Toumani Touré, on the grounds that he was failing to prevent the rapid takeover of much of the country by Tuareg rebels and Islamic militants. It didn’t take long for Mali’s erstwhile colonial rulers, the French, to appear and put an end to both the coup and the southward movement of the militants. President Touré, who was himself associated with an earlier coup in 1991 that eventually led to democracy in Mali, did not return to power and new elections were called. In July of 2013 the presidential elections brought Mali back into the democratic fold. The Legislative Assembly vote that I observed in November of the same year was meant to close the unwelcome chapter of the country’s political history as quickly as possible, even as concerns lingered over the validity of any results that came from wide swaths of northern Mali that remained in militant hands.
A few months earlier I had just wrapped up my first posting as an immigration officer in Hong Kong, on the other side of the planet in all respects. I was now an accompanying spouse on my partner’s first posting, and experiencing the shock of suddenly having a lot of spare time. So when the call went out for election observers about a week before the vote, I quickly raised my hand.
A couple of days prior to the vote, knowing that I would be taking part, I started asking the odd Malians their opinions on the election. A friendly taxi driver seemed to sum up the sentiment of the capital, which in the end had about 30% voter turnout – “the parliamentary elections don’t matter, because all the power is with the president”. On the day of the vote at around 7 a.m. we set out to the first of a half-dozen schools that were doubling as voter centres we would visit that day. The first centre was empty. Once we tracked down the man in charge, who spent a few minutes digging up the bibs for the polling officers before he would talk to us, he explained that it was simply too early to see many voters. An hour later, when we arrived at the second centre, things weren’t much different.
One of the things we had been told to look out for was voter manipulation. It was a challenging task in those first few hours as voters trickled in at a rate of about two per hour. Party representatives, on the other hand, lounged outside of stations in greater numbers than voters for most of the morning, slung across their motos in the shade of trees and school houses with no apparent interest in what was going on. The highlight of the morning came when I observed one of the party reps nonchalantly putting X’s over the names of registered voters that hung on the walls outside each station. I asked my colleague to enquire about what she was doing. “Just marking who has already voted” she responded. A good follow-up question probably would have been “why?” but following the first question she decided to stop the practice.
Even as I started to feel a little down at the low voter turnout, and the inexplicable peculiarities of the process, there were moments of real enjoyment in observing the election unfold. Posters at one station declared Femme du Mali votons massive-ment. Their presence wasn’t quite ’massive’, but women were present as election officials, party officials, observers, and voters at every station we visited. Shortly after taking a photo of one of these posters I was approached by a young Malian woman who eagerly told me about the campaign she volunteered for to encourage turnout among female voters. She explained the purpose of the campaign, the importance of participation in a democracy, and universal voter rights better than I ever could.
It was abundantly clear that the international community wanted this vote to work out. That poster extolling women to vote had the flags and logos of 17 countries and organizations on it. In the span of about thirty minutes observing one particular polling station, which was one out of about twenty at a particular school, observers from the EU, two Malian NGOs, and the United States all made appearances. It was hard to reconcile the apparent apathy of the local population with the enthusiasm of foreign powers. Where is the definitive indicator of self-determination in this sort of circumstance, and where does the will to see legitimate election results outweigh the ability to actually realize them, especially in the face of significant voter apathy?
I was reminded of this again at the end of the day, when we arrived at our final polling station to observe the vote count. The rules in Mali stated that once the ballot box was opened, no one could enter or leave the poll, which in this case was a classroom that entered into a central courtyard of a secondary school. At this single polling station at least a third of the twenty or so people present were international observers. The rest were party representatives. The polling officer read the rules diligently as the sun slowly set and the room grew darker. About a quarter of the way into the counting a single fluorescent bulb was flicked on to give the room it’s only light. We all squinted to see the ballots as they were held up at the front of the room, counted and marked on a chalkboard. Once or twice the power failed all together and the officers pulled out flashlights and headlamps until a generator kicked in. The door remained open to prevent the oppressive heat from the bodies of twenty or so people trapped in the tiny room from suffocating us all. We sat on rickety school benches on uneven packed-earth floors. Every once and a while over the course of the count one of the benches would make a creaking sound as if it were about to break under the weight of the many adult bodies it wasn’t designed to hold.
While everything about the process was imperfect, it appeared functional. The light coming from that single fluorescent bulb was just enough to see the ballots. The room was just big enough for everyone to fit. The occasional departure or arrival at the open door was observed by the vote counters and concerns were raised and addressed if it seemed suspicious. Anyone present had the right to protest the inclusion of a ballot if the validity was in question, a right party representatives happily took advantage of but never pushed too hard on. There were no fights, and at the end no one seemed particularly surprised by the results. The party of the president won a majority and other parties not insignificant portions of the vote. After counting was completed the ballot box was resealed and carried off. The national results largely reflected that single polling station.
As a Canadian, and as someone who had never observed our own elections in the same level of detail, there were aspects of what I observed that I could clearly define as specific to Mali, others that I could just as easily see happening in Canada, and still others that seemed bizarre (read suspicious) no matter the context. Polling officers not being entirely sure of all the rules and having to go find the instructions book would not surprise me in Canada or Mali. Voters not being able to find their polls, or the single laptop that held the registry having a poor internet connection, while concerns for the integrity of the process, didn’t seem surprising given the context. On the other hand, in a country where corruption and graft are rampant, a police officer appearing before the polls had closed with cash in hand to pay the polling officers, as happened at one station we visited, set off a few alarms in my head. Whether this is the sort of thing that is sufficient to question the results of an entire election was hard to tell. Whether the return to democracy outweighs certain issues popping up here and there is also a hard call. As an observer I didn’t have to make those calls, I just asked questions, took notes and reported back.
As an immigration officer, I am trained in fraud detection. Part of this involves knowing when inconsistencies, uncertainties, and unknowns are material to the decisions I have to make. Whether a potential issue could lead to material information being found fraudulent determines whether or not you choose to pursue it further. As an election observer, I didn’t have to make any decisions, but the same principles held true. For many of the inconsistencies I observed, plausible explanations that did not involve fraud or voter manipulation were present given the context of the elections that did after all take place shortly after a coup d’état, in the midst of ongoing instability in large areas of the north, and in one of the poorest countries on the planet. While my knowledge of Mali was limited, I was nonetheless constantly reminded of these simple structural factors that made it almost impossible for the process to be perfectly transparent to an outsider, or even many Malians. I also knew that these structural limitations meant that fraud could be more easily committed and hidden completely.
A second text message a couple of weeks later marked the beginning of the second and final round of voting in the legislative elections. In short order the victory of the president’s party was confirmed and the international community declared a definitive return to democracy. The voter turnout for the election was about nation-wide 40%, giving President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita 78% of the Legislative Assembly’s seats. In the restive north the voter turnout was higher than anywhere else in the country, even as a bomb killed two UN peacekeepers in the same week of the final vote. In the three years since the election, and two and a half years since I left Bamako, the capital has experienced a number of deadly terrorist attacks. Instability in the north remains while the international community has continued to try to solidify a lengthy and uncertain peace process.
The ultimate unsettling convenience of my role both as an election observer and a member of the international community present in Mali in 2013 was that I could, and eventually did, leave the country. Observing elections and declaring democracy functional or dysfunctional on that basis is a facile approach to assessing the validity of a political process that is at constant risk of collapse, as was shown in Mali in 2012. No matter the party or president elected, what I observed and recorded on the ground, or how much the international community wanted the elections to be valid, Malians were ultimately the ones left to hold their new government to account.
Alex Johnston is a FS immigration officer at IRCC. After finishing his first posting in Hong Kong in 2013, he saw the Foreign Service life from the other side, accompanying his spouse on a posting to Bamako. Alex has also completed temporary duty assignments in Lagos, Pretoria, Riyadh and most recently Beirut assisting with Canada’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees. He is currently finishing a MA in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, and occasionally, to varying degrees of success, attempts to build things out of wood.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 14–17. Read the rest of this issue →
