OSCE/ODIHR see flaws in Albania vote count

TIRANA, July 11 – Albania is looking forward to having a positive report from the international observers monitoring its parliamentary election.
That seems unlikely for this tiny Balkan country.
A day after the voting international observers reported some improvement but cited a need for further progress to comply with international standards including, an end to widespread family voting and the polarized political climate.
In their first post-election preliminary report last weekend they said that political interference had delayed the vote count of last month’s general election in Albania.
Some 500 international election observers have been monitoring Albania’s election process, considered an important test for the small Balkan country’s progress toward democracy.
“The vote count was protracted and marked by high levels of mistrust among political parties and their representatives at all levels of the election administration,” said an interim report by an international observer mission headed by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
Albania’s election commission is currently considering complaints from political parties before the final allocation of seats can be made in the 140-seat parliament.
According to preliminary results, conservative Prime Minister Sali Berisha won 47.99 percent, the opposition Socialist won 44.31 percent and the small SMI party 5.48 percent.
Berisha’s Democrats and the SMI agreed to form a coalition and to advance Albania’s goal of European Union membership as a priority.
But opposition Socialists accuse the governing party of interfering with the recount in an effort to win more seats in parliament and they threaten not to recognize the final result.
The observers assessed the count as bad or very bad at 22 out of 66 voting centers, which “provoked tensions among parties, especially where results were or appeared to be close.”
They also noted procedural problems due to lack of sufficient training and guidance, and criticized the Central Elections Commission, the leading administrative body, of insufficient guidance of lower level administration and inconsistent handling of complaints.
The election dispute comes as Albania is seeking to improve its election standards and to gain eventual EU membership. Albania, which joined NATO in April, has been under intense international pressure to ensure the seventh post-communist vote was free of the kind of fraud that marred the first six elections held after the Balkan country’s communist regime fell in 1990.
The OSCE/ODIHR EOM debriefed its short-term and long-term observers. The Core Team continued its regular activities and meeting schedule. The OSCE/ODIHR EOM will retain a small team of experts to continue its observation of the remaining stages of the electoral process, in particular the handling of complaints and appeals by the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the Electoral College.