On election day, more than three hundred trained count monitors will wear brightly-colored shirts and caps and carry hand-held packet-based wireless communications.

Support for the Albania 2009 Parliamentary Elections

Monitoring Pre-Election Period
To learn how cities and civil society organization are organizing for the June elections, the Embassy’s Political and Economic Section is sending officers to cities throughout Albania. During these trips, officers meet with government officials, political party leaders, NGOs,business contacts, university students, and other groupsto view election preparations first hand.

Media Monitoring
USAID is sponsoring a NG0-based monitoring of the campaign coverage on television and in the print media in the 45 day campaign period leading up to the June 28th elections. The Albanian organization that will monitor the media will use a state-of-the-art system that measures air time and column length devoted to coverage of each of the political parties to the elections. The methodology used will allow the NGO to track bias and favoritism in media coverage, which in turn, allows the media to make adjustments during the campaign to provide more even-handed coverage of the electoral subjects and avoid bias. It will release weekly reports on their findings, which will be disseminated to the public via press conferences.

Central Elections Commission
The U.S. is providing technical assistance to the Albanian Central Elections Commission to develop a public information campaign, explaining to voters new voting procedures and ID documents for voting, as well as urging voters to vote on election day. Assistance will also include the production of a training video and other materials for all elections commissioners to ensure that personnelrecruited to perform their civic responsibilities in these elections understand new voting procedures. The U.S.is also supervising and testing the new count monitoring and preliminary results reporting system. USAID will provide IT and other expertise to ensure the system is properly installed and is fully operational before election day.

Support for Civil Society
Albania’s civil society has a vital role in ensuring the integrity of Albania’s June 28, 2009 parliamentary elections. For this reason, the US Embassy-Tirana Democracy Commission is supporting a domestic election monitoring effort involving an umbrella organization comprising several Albanian NGOs that will train and mobilize more than two thousand stationary observers on Election Day where they will monitor voting and counting processes.

Democracy Commission Grants:

• Albanian Group of Journalists
• Albanian Helsinki Committee
• Albanian Institute for Election System Development (AIESD)
• European Movement in Albania (EMA)
• For Women and Children Kombinat Center
• Institute for Women and Development Alternatives
• KRIIK-Albania
• "Mjaft"
• Society for Democratic Culture (SDC)
• Partners-Albania, Centre for Change and Conflict Management

Elections Working Group
This previously bimonthly and now weekly meeting is attended by all of the embassies and multilateral organizations involved in providing assistance during Albania’s June 28th electoral period. Led by the OSCE and USAID, the group also includes as government officials that play important roles in administering the elections. The purpose of the group is to coordinate donor assistance and avoid duplication of donor assistance, and also to provide a medium for communication about the status of elections preparations among members of the international community and between the internationals and Albanian elections officials. The group has been in place since 2004 and has coordinated in this fashion for three consecutive election(GPRS) units to relay results in real time from the counting centers to the headquarters in Tirana, where results will be confirmed, collated, and reported at a special media center and posted on the PVT website.