Success Stories
- Last Updated on: May 15, 2005
|
Election Officials and Public Trained on Free Election Process
Albanian Officials and Public Train for Elections
Election Officials and Public Trained on Free Election Process
June 15, 2005 | Tirana, Albania
A month before Albania’s parliamentary elections, a dozen people heatedly discussed where observers should be posted to monitor the July 3 elections. Maps with pen marks and yellow post-it stickers abounded.
“We will follow the election, looking for problems and irregularities – we will follow everything that will happen from the beginning to the end,” said Pjerin Marku of the Albania Coalition Against Corruption, an NGO that has trained some 3,000 domestic election observers through a USAID grant.
The meeting participants were the heads of the seven local organizations conducting election monitoring. Among them was Gerta Meta of the Society for Democratic Culture, an NGO that has monitored 14 local and parliamentary elections in Albania since 1992.
“We hope on behalf of civil society that people will vote, and we hope that big numbers will go,” she said. “This election is very important for our country, for integration in Europe.”
In a room next door to the meeting, half a dozen computers were registering the amount of press each party received in newspapers, TV, and radio coverage. Every two weeks – since May and through the election – media monitors hold a press conference and reveal their findings.
“This is the first time that we monitor not only quantitative data, but also qualitative,” Marku said. “After the first report, a lot of media changed the way they report about the campaigns” to make their coverage more objective, he said.
USAID this year spent $2.2 million on support to: parties, civic forums, televised parliamentary debates, NGO monitoring of the electoral process, and media coverage of the elections.
Another $1.3 million was invested on the official side of the elections, mostly providing technical assistance to Albania’s Central Election Commission (CEC). The national voter registry was updated, and all data was entered into a computer data bank. USAID helped CEC to create digital maps of all regions, pinpointing where people reside, the size of local populations, and where the nearest voting sites should be. The maps were also used by local governments to prepare voter lists.
The Agency backed training for election officials on the new election law, which was passed in December 2004. One of the law’s features is the institution of centralized counting. In past elections, each of Albania’s 4,700 voter polling stations counted and reported its own results. This time, ballot boxes will be packed and transported to 100 zonal counting centers, reducing the possibility of fraud.
CEC officials were sent over the past year to observe the voting process in Britain and Austria, where vote counting is also centralized. Hundreds of voting instruction manuals were also printed for the officials.
With U.S. aid, CEC held a voter awareness campaign called “My Vote,” urging voters to cast a ballot, and educating them about what ID to present and how to properly mark their vote. TV and radio spots ran for months. Sample voting kiosks were set up on the streets of 14 cities. Ads also ran on street banners, billboards, and in newspapers. The message to vote was even placed on sugar packets.
“This is the first time that anything like this has been done in Albania,” said Adriatik Mema of CEC. “These promotional materials have been done even in the language of minority groups – so you can find them in Greek, Serbian, Macedonian.”
Some promotional posters addressed specific issues, such as family voting, an illegal practice where one family member brings documentation for their relatives and casts a ballot for each of them.
