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By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 17 July:
The High National Election Commission (HNEC) has announced that the counting of votes has been completed and . . .[restrict]that it will be releasing the final preliminary results of the General National Congress elections today (Tuesday 17 July) at an 8 pm news conference at its media center.
It stressed that these results would still be preliminary since by law there needs to be a 14 day appeals window, and only then would the accredited election results become final.
There has been some frustration expressed as a result of the delay in the announcement of the final election count and a feeling that the HNEC should have kept the general public better informed for the reasons for the delay.
Libya Herald can reveal it has seen internal HNEC documents explaining the reasons for the delayed vote count. The HNEC documents show that 74 polling stations in 8 different districts that had inconsistencies in their results and needed re-checking or re-counting.
The documents show that, amongst others, all the districts of Ajdabya, 41 in Tripoli and 14 in Tobruk needed re-checking.
The reasons why the 74 polling stations needed re-checking or re-counting were either missing results lists or missing results pages from the lists.
Libya Herald has not been able to ascertain whether the missing results lists were due to error, bad organization or whether they were removed in an attempt to pervert the final election results.
Either way, we wait to see if the 74 missing result sheets have been recovered or if the HNEC simply re-counted the ballot papers. There had already been cases announced where election officers in confusion inserted the result sheets into the ballot boxes. These boxes were then opened transparently in view of the media and independent monitors to retrieve the result sheets.
The 74 polling stations represent about 5 percent out of the total 1,554 polling stations all over Libya [/restrict]
