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Ivory Coast Voters Await Presidential Election Outcome

Scott Stearns | Abidjan 02 November 2010

Voters in Ivory Coast are waiting to find out who won Sunday's presidential election. The vote is meant to reunite the country eight years after the start of civil war.

By law, Ivory Coast's electoral commission has until Wednesday to announce the results. Commission president Youssouf Bakayoko says officials are taking the time to do their job properly.

Bakayoko says when you are comparing results from polling stations it takes time because the electoral commission wants to make sure that the results it announces are incontestable.

The head of the U.N. observer mission here has met separately with the three leading candidates and says all have agreed to accept the electoral commission's results.

President Laurent Gbagbo is running for re-election. His principal challengers are former president Henri Konan Bedie and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara.

Gbagbo supporter Stanislas Tape says voters want winners and losers to keep in mind how much Ivory Coast needs peace.

He says voters are hoping the results will be accepted by every candidate who lost because people are truly tired of the violence the country has sunk into for the last 10 years, the cause of all the poverty people feel.

Ouattara supporter Moussa Konate says the vote has already been a win for Ivory Coast.

Konate says the president who is elected will not just be for one party or the other. There will be only one president for the entire country. He says the maturity that this election has brought Ivorian youth in the political arena is a victory that is already won.

If no one wins more than half these ballots, there will be a run off between the top two finishers. So candidates must do well with their electoral base to lay the foundation for potential second-round alliances. Bedie and Ouattara have already said they will support the other if either man faces President Gbagbo in a run off.