by uko Maeda

22 November 2005

Monrovia, Liberia: Holding a notepad and a pen in one hand and a hand radio in the other, Poo Lin Stefano-Wong walked busily through a polling place to another at a voting precinct in the capital city of Monrovia all the while giving detailed instructions to national staff.

“Please make sure they (voters) dry the ink before rubbing the finger with sands or something,” she reminded an inker of the importance of eliminating any possibility of double-voting as the ink on the forefinger is the proof of a voter casting the ballot. “Please ask voters if they need any assistance before they enter the polling centre, and if yes, let them bring someone to assist them,” she instructed a presiding officer when a middle-aged woman looked confused behind the voting screen. No voter was supposed to get out of a polling centre to seek assistance after receiving a blank ballot paper and until casting the ballots.

Seeing some of the voting screens were placed near open windows of the bamboo wall, Stefano-Wong rushed to bring large sheets of paper to block the view. “It (voting) must not be seen,” she explained, highlighting the need to maintain secrecy as she taped the papers. “Keep an eye on that. Nobody must spy.” She ordered and walked into the next polling place. “Oh, no, don’t put a pen on this table! Make sure a pen is kept away from the (blank) ballot papers.” She reminded a ballot paper issuer so that no one would suspect him of marking the ballots before issuing them to voters.

For Stefano-Wong, whom the national polling staff affectionately call “Major” for her tough commanding style, keeping an eye on every aspect of the voting process is the only way to ensure the elections are free, fair and transparent. As an Electoral Support Officer with the United Nations Mission in Liberia’s Electoral Division in charge of six voting precincts in the greater Monrovia area, she could not allow any procedural neglect which might jeopardize the integrity of the polling process.

“Believe me, we are running around like an idiot,” she chuckled in the car on the run-off election day. On 8 November, her day started at 3 a.m. with the delivery of “sensitive” polling materials to her six precincts from the warehouse. Once polling began at 8 a.m., she repeatedly circled around the 33 polling places in her six precincts to monitor the operation, replace broken lamps, stamps or seals with reserves at the warehouse and give on-the-spot instructions to the national staff. When night fell, she again drove around the precincts to monitor ballot-counting before retrieving the ballot papers to the warehouse and the tally sheets to the county tally centre around midnight. Still she said it was much easier than the first round national elections. “On October 11, we worked 36 hours non-stop without food, water and sleep, finishing up all the work 10:30 (the) next morning.”

Stefano-Wong was one of 183 UN Volunteers with the Mission’s Electoral Division that worked side by side with the National Elections Commission (NEC) to support every aspect of the electoral process to maintain international standards. The UN Volunteers, accounting for nearly 90 per cent of the entire Electoral manpower, were literally in the forefront of the electoral exercise.

Since October 2004, scores of UN Volunteers have been engaged in all aspects of the preparations for the elections. They played a vital role in conducting the polls, helped register 1.35 million voters across the country, carried out civic education campaigns travelling on foot to the remotest villages, identified more than 1,500 registration centres and 3,070 polling stations, and trained over 18,000 national staff. Other teams of Electoral UN Volunteers also advised on legal matters, designed ballot papers and public information materials and ran a data/tally centre where all the data of registration and polling results were processed.

“This is clearly an instance of UN Volunteers helping make history,” said Ray Kennedy, Director of the Electoral Division.

Joan Bao-In, County Electoral Advisor for the Upper Montserrado District, was part of the history-making team. On 8 November, she went around her district hopping in and out of polling centres while coordinating the movement of electoral support officers and the UNMIL security force over hand radios and monitoring the polling operation. “I believe in what we’re doing,” she said at a rural polling centre. “It’s very rewarding and gives you satisfaction.”

With the elections coming to a successful conclusion, a sense of fulfilment was palpable among the Volunteer teams. “We were imparting our skills and our experience to Liberians in such an important process by setting an example,” said Stefano-Wong. “Hopefully they watched what we did and learned something from it.”

Yuko Maeda is a UN Volunteer from Japan working with UNMIL as a public information officer. This article was first published in UNMIL FOCUS, the flagship magazine of the Mission in Liberia.