President Omar Al-Bashir was declared winner of the first multiparty elections in 24 years in Sudan. However, Muawia Abdel Karim argues in his blog post at Making Sense of Sudan that nobody will ever know who really won the election. And Maggie Fick of Enough Project reports that the potential for post-election violence in South Sudan remains. Muawiaexplains why we will never know who really won the historic elections: The counting of votes has been so chaotic that it is simply impossible to find out the true number of votes cast for each candidate. Every single check and balance that should be in place to allow the election observers to see which results are genuine and which are fraudulent have been bypassed. We don’t know how many books of ballots were distributed to each polling station, how many were used, and which voting tallies accord with which station. Most of the NEC staff who are tallying the votes are untrained, recruited just days ago with no experience at all! Some of them have to ask the observers for assistance because the observers know their job better than they do. The sheets with the totals have one number written in, rubbed out, overwritten again, time and again! It is so chaotic it is shameful! Every day the NEC instructs that there has to be another shortcut so that they can announce something. No wonder the Chairman of the NEC has washed his hands of all the thousands of complaints and told everyone to go to court instead. Anyone who harboured any doubts that the results are 100% set by political interests only had to see how Malik Agar won the Blue Nile for the SPLM! One day he was losing the count and telling the NCP that if he lost he would go back to war and demanding a recount. The next day the top brass of the NCP flew to Damazin and suddenly some forgotten ballot boxes appeared and Commander Agar suddenly was declared the victor! Those who had rigged the election in the first place shamelessly counter-rigged the next day. Commenting on Muawia’s post, Khalid Yousif says: Dear Muawia Abdel Karim, I agree with you that the international community got the commodity of the 2011 referendum and the Sudanese paid the price. since the beginning the NEC was designed a tool to be manipulated by the NCP and intentionally it was set to be blamed as scape goat for the rigging at the end under the disguise of inexperience, technical problems and ill-preparations. For the fist time since 1989 Khalid Yousif agrees with President Omar Al-Bashir: Once Al-Bashir said if the US is pleased with what you are doing thenthat means you are on the wrong track. This is the first time that I agree with him since 1989. Another reader, Abd al-Wahab Abdalla, argues that Sudanese elections should remind us that the West is not an impartial referee: Equally this election should at long last bury the canard that the western world is some kind of impartial referee, upholding universal standards. This is a kind of right-fetishism dearly nourished by those who have lost touch with the realities of power and the demands of political mobilization. This referee can blow his whistle as much as he likes and wave yellow cards to his heart’s content (he has no red cards) but the only one who will be fooled is the player who is flat on the pitch while play goes on. The western countries have their interests and they pursue them, and those who believe that they will set aside material and political objectives for the sake of a few slogans deserve only the wake-up call that has inexorably occurred. Maggie Fick in a new field dispatch highlights political tensions underlying four races in South Sudan: Ballots have been cast and counted in South Sudan, but the potential for post-electoral violence still remains. The results of several hotly contested races for state governor have the potential to spark local violence and even broader conflict in the near future. “If democracy was born in the West, it had certainly been buried in the jungles of Southern Sudan,” writes Black Kush: In the election, the battle ground states were Central Equatoria, Westen Equatoria and Unity States, where the independent candidates were more popular than the SPLM candidates. People fee that the SPLM official candidats are being force on them, and they turn to show their disatisfaction by vooting for the independent candidates. However, things have not turn out as expected. In Central Equatoria, the incumbent SPLM Candidate got through as well as in Unity State. The initial results show that the independents were leading, but due to pressure, the State election officilas have to succumb to pressure and announce the incumbents winners. Too bad for a fledgeling democracy, if you can call it that.