Didn’t see enough engineering to overturn results: EU election observers

The Election Commission has done a lot to make the process and the results transparent, says Ivars Ijabs

A European Union mission that observed Bangladesh’s 13th parliamentary elections says it did not see a scale of electoral engineering that would change the outcome of the polls.

The mission’s head Ivars Ijabs presented the full report of the mission at a press conference on Tuesday, two months after the election.

He said, “We did our work according to the best practices of electoral observation, that are internationally accepted, and we didn't observe anything that might resemble some kind of electoral engineering that might invalidate the results.”

Highlighting the Election Commission's initiative in counting the results, he said: " I think that the Election Commission has really done a lot in order to make this whole thing transparent - just to have the results go from the very top, from the national level, down to the single polling station, as you see.”

Highlighting the legal opportunity to go to court with complaints, Ivars said: "I think this is really important, also, for citizens. If you really have any allegations about electoral engineering, fraud, whatever, you can just legally contest the result, and there is a procedure for how to do that.”

He noted that some cases were still pending, but said he does not know of any democratic election where there are no minor complaints.

"The important thing is that there is always a clear, neutral, impartial, legal procedure."

When asked about the allegations of election engineering in the Dhaka-15 and Dhaka-8 constituencies, the head of the EU election monitoring team said it did not want to comment on specific issues.

He added that anyone with complaints could seek legal redress.

Ivars described the existence of a legal process as positive and suggested a speedy resolution of pending complaints.