Photo Credit: USAID/Albania

Monitors Accredited for USAID-Supported Parallel Vote Count

TIRANA, June 24, 2009     Central Elections Commission Chairman Arben Ristani today conferred accreditation on two Albanian organizations that will work together to carry out the first Parallel Vote Count ever conducted in an Albanian general election.  

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Parallel Vote Count will be carried out by the Elections to Conduct Agency (ECA) and KRIIK Albania, who have trained 450 monitors to observe counting processes in all 66 counting centers throughout the country. 

The monitors, wearing bright yellow jerseys and hats bearing the “double check mark” logo of the parallel vote count, will enter the results from each vote tally sheet onto hand-held personal digital assistants, which will transmit results for dissemination cumulatively throughout the vote counting process through press conferences and online at http://www.eca.al/.

U.S. Ambassador John L. Withers and OSCE Head of Presence Robert Bosch praised the monitors for their dedication to free and fair elections.  They also lauded the CEC for its openness to observation and its efforts to prepare Albania for the June 28, 2009 parliamentary elections. 

The U.S. Ambassador distinguished the parallel count from the official count, saying that the former aims “to hold the official count under closer scrutiny, double-check its accuracy, to reinforce public confidence in the results.” Although financed by the United States, he added, the parallel count “is not an American count [but] an independent reckoning of real votes cast by real Albanians.”