It has been five years since the end of a 21-year civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern SPLM rebels that killed two million people and displaced more than four million others in Africa’s largest country. According to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the people of Southern Sudan will probably vote in a self-determination referendum in 2010 that is expected to result in a seperation vote.

The detailed results of this week’s elections are uncertain, but Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will almost certainly win the presidency of Sudan and Salva Kiir Mayardit is expected to win the Presidency of Southern Sudan’s semi-autonomous region. But these anticipated results are not without controversy during these elections when votes will be cast for two presidents, 24 governors and 26 state and national assemblies on up to 12 different ballots. The logistical challenges for holding these elections have already shown errors.

Africa correspondent for The Globe and Mail, Geoffrey York, has reported via Twitter that cardboard polling booths tend to blow away in the wind, that some polling stations failed to open on time because polling material had yet to arrive, or had received the wrong polling papers, that some polling stations stayed open three hours longer than planned, and that there is talk of adding a fourth day of polling to the elections.

Reuters reported that “confusion soon erupted on Sunday as centre after centre, sometimes hours into the voting, discovered that voters were using the wrong ballot papers or that names or symbols of candidates were either missing or incorrect.”

(source: SPLM Voices)

Most of the six million registered voters are participating in elections for the first time. With low literacy rates, particularly in the South, Darfur and other mostly-rural regions of Sudan, understanding the process (and the ballot papers themselves) cannot be taken for granted. The Guardian wrote that “the southern president, Salva Kiir Mayardit – himself a first-time voter – had to wait for nearly half an hour for his polling station to open, and then spoiled his first vote by dropping it in the wrong box.”

Concerns of election rigging were detailed in a March 30 policy briefing from the International Crisis Group as well as the consequences of a win by current President Omar al-Bashir, who has an arrest warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur by the International Criminal Court.

The report accused the Khartoum government of manipulating the 2008 Fifth Population and Housing Census “by not counting opponents”. The NCP government were also accused of “drawing electoral constituencies to favour its candidates”, by drafting biased election laws, of tampering with voter registration and “the failure of the National Elections Commission (NEC) to properly train its registration officials and to conduct civic education campaigns nationwide.”

The NEC was also under fire for deciding to change the printer of the presidential and gubernatorial ballot papers from a Slovenian firm to the government’s own Sudanese Currency Printing Corporation. Potential tampering of the ballots quickly became a concern, as opposition parties demanded a probe into the ballots.

Government repression of opposition candidates, from both the NCP in the north and SPLM in the south, have been documented.

One day after the release of the ICC policy briefing, the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement withdrew its presidential candidate, Yasir Arman, from the electoral race for Sudan’s presidency because of continued conflict in Darfur and “election irregularities.” The SPLM has since decided to boycott all polling in the 13 states in the north. Other opposition parties have also chosen to boycott the elections. The boycott is designed to delegitimize the expected results of a win for Omar al-Bashir that would be gained by government rigging the electoral process.

The voting is to finish on April 13 (or maybe April 14 if there is an extension) with results scheduled to be declared on April 18.

The air was frigid, hovering at around -16 degrees Celcius. Not too much wind and a bright sun made the 1.5 km walk bearable as the crowd made their way north along Peel street from Dorchester Square before walking eastward along Ste-Catherine street past Complexe Desjardins turning south on St-Urbain street and a final right turn to end in front of the Canadian government building, Complexe Guy-Favreau.

I often try to figure out the quantity of people in a crowd. Yesterday, I placed myself at the corner of Metcalfe and Ste-Catherine streets as the front of the march approached and tried my best to count the passing crowd. I calculated the numbers and came up with 6200 people. So that’s my estimate.

After drinking a hot chocolate in Place-des-Arts with friends (where I took a photo of 43-day-old Sofia, probably the youngest demonstrator at the protest whose parents hoped she would be able to visit an independent Palestine before she’s old enough to vote), I returned home to look for estimates of the numbers of people in the demonstration. The numbers I found vary widely.

The CBC wrote, “about 1,000 marched in a protest organized by several large labour federations in support of the Palestinian people of Gaza.” La Presse, a French-language Montréal daily, wrote, “Montréal, ils étaient environ 2.000 à défiler dans les rues du centre-ville.” Approximately 2000 was their estimate. The Montréal Gazette wrote yesterday that their were 10,000 protesters in the demo, which was probably based on police figures of how many people they expected (as indicated in today’s Gazette article. Their estimate is now vague with, “Thousands of people marched down Ste. Catherine St. yesterday to speak with one voice: ‘Stop the madness. … We are all Palestinians’”, Where is it that I read something like, “If one among us is in chains, then we all are.” A Palestinian living in Montréal claimed that 15,000 attended the demonstration. Optimistic.

Farouk El-Baz, then director of Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing and expert crowd counter, claims:

When crowds gather to make political statements, it matters how many people turn out. Crowd size matters to organizers, who invariably say they made their point. It matters to police departments, who insist they fielded the right number of officers. It matters to the media, who often claim they’ve reported the facts. And it matters to elected officials, who often like to act as if the whole thing never happened.

El-Baz was hired by ABC News to estimate the numbers of people who attended the 1995′s Million-Man March. Organizers, The Nation of Islam claimed the attendance was about 1.5 million. The National Park Service (NPS), which is responsible for the Mall area of Washington DC, reported 400,000 people at its highest moment. His method of counting crowds gave him an estimate of 870,000 with a margin of error of 25%, which means that the crowd would have ranged from 652,500 to 1,087,500. Both organizers and the NPS were happy with this amount.

Standing on a street corner, counting the crowd as it walks by may not be as accurate as El-Baz’s methodology, but adding up the compassion in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza kept me focussed on my math. 6200 is somewhere in the middle: a happy median, being the only one with an applied methodology based on direct observation.