Sudan must overcome ”tremendous challenges” to hold a complex election that forms a key part of a peace accord, a United Nations official said on Wednesday.
The vote set for April 2010 is crucial to the success of the accord, which ended a civil war between north and south Sudan, and to the chances of Sudan reaching long-term stability.
It will be the first multi-party elections in Africa’s largest country in more than 20 years.
The UN’s chief electoral affairs officer in Sudan, Ray Kennedy, told a news briefing the Sudanese organisers were facing a series of problems.
One challenge was the election’s complexity, with six votes running at the same time using a range of voting methods.
”I have been working in elections for 20 years and these are the most complex arrangements I have ever been involved in,” Kennedy told Reuters after the briefing.
”It is going to make it very difficult for voters to understand. But we were involved with elections in Haiti in the 1990s with multiple votes and many illiterate voters. There are things that can be done to make it work.
Voters will choose Sudan’s president, members of Parliament, state governors and members of state assemblies. In the south, citizens will also select Southern Sudan’s president and members of its legislative assembly.
The National Elections Commission said presidential candidates will need more than 50% of the vote to win.
Others will need just a simple majority while some votes will also be based on proportional representation, with special rules to guarantee a proportion of female candidates.
The size and landscape of the country pose another problem, Kennedy said, as do time constraints.
The UN was planning to send officers to all 25 Sudanese states to help run the elections, and had been asked to provide helicopters to transport ballots and other voting material.
Preparations have also been held up by arguments between the two main members of Sudan’s current coalition government, formed by the 2005 peace deal.
Former southern rebels the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) have accused their northern partners, the National Congress Party, of fixing the results of a census used to demarcate constituencies.
A recent surge of tribal killings in southern Sudan has raised concerns over how a vote will be held there.
The elections, originally scheduled for July 2009, have already been delayed twice.
Two million people died and four million fled their homes between 1983 and 2005 as Sudan’s mostly Muslim north and its mainly Christian south battled over differences in ideology, ethnicity and religion. — Reuters