LTO Cambodia: Election Day, morning

Inked.

Election day in Cambodia, Prey Veng province, July 28, 2013

Here’s a quick dump of a few photos from polling stations I visited this morning (before 11AM.) I visited about 17 polling stations at 8 different locations in Prey Veng province, most in the countryside outside the city.

Some stray notes:

I noticed that there are polling station staff assigned to assist people locate their names on the posted registration lists. There is a lot of lingering at the registration lists as people search for their names.

Have seen a lot of ICE forms being used as ID, especially at polling stations in the countryside away from the city. Most, but not all, were young people. I spoke to 6 or 7 ICE form holders about it. All but one said that they have only a family book as ID but there is only one family book for the whole family, yet there are several people of voting age in their family. So rather than pass the family book around between everybody, they got the ICE forms to have individual IDs for voting.

As of 11AM more than half of the polling stations I have visited have had around 30% turnout. Most of these stations have been in the countryside and the polling staff speculates that the farmers are working in the fields in the morning and may come to vote in the afternoon.

I have seen multiple party observers at every polling station and non-party observers (COMFREL, Transparency International, unidentified non-party) at about 70% of the visited stations.

One observer told me that as soon as he voted he rushed straight home to try to wash off the ink using techniques he read about on Facebook yesterday. Displaying his still stained finger he said, “It didn’t work.”