(English) Why election results in Africa are so slow

Sunday was a busy day for elections around the world. Results from Argentina, Guatemala and Poland were announced within hours, but election officials say results from Tanzania, Ivory Coast and the Congo referendum will take several days.
Everyone hates a slow election process.
It’s not just the voters and the candidates, desperate to know the results.
It’s also the election staff, who probably got up before dawn to prepare the polling station, worked all day running the voting, stayed up most of the night counting the ballots and then had to take the results to a central point and wait for hours, sometimes days, to see their results safely received and entered into the system.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo capital Kinshasa in 2011, I remember presiding officers at the tally centre, fast asleep on top of their sacks of ballot papers; in Nigeria the same year, I watched as the Edo state election commissioner, red-eyed and grey with fatigue, waited for the last results – carried by canoe and motor boat – to finally arrive from the creeks of the Niger Delta.
Presidentially slow
The problem is not a lack of technology.
The UK still uses the most primitive of voting systems – paper ballots, physically carried to the counting centre and counted by hand.
But the UK, like Poland, which voted at the weekend, and India, the biggest democracy of all, has a big advantage.
It’s a parliamentary system, so the election in each constituency is complete in itself and can be declared immediately; there is no need to wait for results from the whole country to know who the next president will be.
Apart from Ethiopia, most African countries have presidential systems, and these are inevitably slower.
Fears of fraud
The other advantage the UK has is one of trust.
Where there has been very little past fraud, there is no need for time-consuming safeguards.
Polling officials could simply phone their result in to the national election commission, and no-one would doubt them. But unhappily that is not the case in most of Africa.
The Edo State results had to be brought physically to Benin City so that the commissioner could see that the results sheets had not been altered and all the party agents had signed that they were correct.
And the commissioner then had to get on a plane and personally fly to the capital, Abuja, carrying the State results sheets (again, signed by all parties) to the national election headquarters.
No wonder the process takes time.
And physically transporting results is not foolproof.
Sometimes the results which arrive are not the same as those which left