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Essay On The 2016 Election

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The IEC Chairman himself guaranteed that the most clear result that on-the-spot counting had on the election is that it provided clear transparency of the voting process, it reduced significantly the risk of corruption and put in power a popular elected President (Jeffang, 2016). On-the-spot counting closed the loopholes on the current election system, preventing a private redistribution of votes and inaccurate countin (Jeffang, 2016). As all parties had to agree with the result, it made it extremely unlikely that the counting was not fair and just (Jeffang, 2016). However, other possible ways of corrupting the voting system could still have been possible, such as violating the drums and adulterating the results, but regardless it took …show more content…

Jammeh’s government did not respond to the Human Rights Watch report, which supported the argument that Gambia has a history of political abuse and election fraud. Omar Amadou Jallow, the leader of the coalition member the People’s Progressive Party stated “For 22 years we have realised that Gambia has been turned into a prison; the arrests, the detentions, the torture, and many of our people have gone into exile ... That shows the tyranny of the regime..We are going to give people their freedoms, their liberties. That is more important than anything else.” (Withnall, 2016).

This reinforces the idea that the phone and internet blockage was a political tactic, and last ditch for President Yahya Jammeh to remain in control of the country. Another possibility that has been debated by the news and scholars is that by controlling communications, the government attempted to prevent protests, in case the result had not been in favor of President Jammeh and to control information sharing. Local observers were unable to track the election, due to the lack of possible communication (Maclean, 2016).

The opposition relied on messaging applications and texts to organize mobile rallies and without the internet, applicatives such as Whatsapp, Skype and Viber were unavailable, unless one had a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which is uncommon and illegal (Al Jazeera, 2016). This movement by the government was seen as an unjustified abuse of freedom of

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