[Al Arabiya Latest] Sudan's first competitive elections in more than two decades "fall short" of meeting international standards, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who has been monitoring the polls, said on Saturday."It is obvious that the elections will fall short of international standards," Carter said.
Carter was speaking shortly after the chief EU election monitor, Veronique de Keyser, made a similar assessment, saying the polls "did not reach international standards."
"These elections have struggled to reach international standards. They have not reached them all," the head of the EU observer mission in Sudan, Veronique de Keyser, told reporters.
She said that, especially in the oil-producing south, there had been cases of harassment and intimidation of voters "which has nothing to do with a democratic process".
Opposition groups and many local observers have accused Bashir's dominant northern National Congress Party (NCP) of rigging preparations for the poll, and said there were huge logistical problems, with names missing from voters' lists.
The elections were set up under a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of north-south war and also promised southerners a 2011 referendum on whether they should split off and become an independent country.
The elections as a whole were marred by complexity and confusion and dominated by the ruling parties in the north and south, said a copy of the EU preliminary report seen by Reuters.
"The election process suffered from unprecedented complexity in its design and consequently from confusion in its implementation," the report said.
The boycotts of northern polls had reduced competition in northern Sudan while in the south "a less controlled environment (led) to more confusion, clashes and intimidation."