There has been very little to no violence in Mali’s past elections, but this year’s poll nearly broke this tradition.
On the 29th of July 2018 the first round of presidential elections were held in the country, unfortunately, neither of the top two candidates received more than 50% of the vote, leading to a second round of elections held on the 12th of August. This was the first time a presidential election was forced into a run-off.
The top two candidates were the Rally for Mali’s candidate, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, and Soumaïla Cissé of the Union for the Republic and Democracy.
Eighteen of the twenty-four candidates contesting in the Mali election refused to accept the initial results announced by the country’s election governing body, stating that the exercise had been marred by irregularities. In a joint statement, they cited instances of vote-buying, ballot stuffing and violence at the polling stations.
Cisse’s campaign director, Tiebile Drame, said: “We do not want to delegitimise the entirety of the process but there needs to be a minimum of credibility.” There was a “village of 150 inhabitants where 3,000 people voted [for Keita],” Drame noted.
Violence at the polls:
In incidents foreign to the Malian voting process, 644 polling stations were reportedly shut down by armed attackers. As there were 23000 total polling stations, the number of stations barred from constituting to the total number of votes made up a whopping 3 percent.
The attacks were allegedly carried out by an al-Qaeda-allied group operating in the northern parts of Mali. Al-Jazeera reported: “Violence cancelled voting in three percent of polling stations and disrupted it in one-fifth, particularly in the central Mopti region where a recent surge in interethnic killings discouraged many residents from casting their ballots.” This exposed the Malian government’s inability to provide security for its citizens living in these parts and their reliance on United Nations peacekeeping troops and French soldiers.
Voice of America reported that “there also were other reasons why Malians could not vote. By early Sunday afternoon, there were reports of attacks in the north and central regions of the country. Timbuktu, Kidal and Mopti reported violent incidents that prevented some people from casting their votes. At least 10 incidents of violence at polling stations and against election officials had been reported by mid-afternoon.”
