Accusations of vote rigging started to emerge hours after the ballot boxes closed in Sunday’s Lebanese elections.
In the Baalbek-Hermel electoral battle, which was the most significant for “Hezbollah”, the rival Mustaqbal Movement and Lebanese Forces (LF) accused the party of rigging the vote in its favor.
It said that “Hezbollah” sought to rig the outcome of the election to ensure the failure of the rival candidates running for the Sunni and Maronite seats in the area. Preliminary results showed the victory of the Mustaqbal and LF candidates.
LF chief Samir Geagea said that ballot boxes without the official seal were counted in the Baalbek region, in violation of the electoral process.
He therefore demanded that Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq intervene to address the situation.
The Mustaqbal said that “Hezbollah” members had entered the Baalbek Serail where the votes were being tallied. They brought with them fake votes and pressured the authorities to rig the voting outcome in the Baalbek-Hermel region to show the defeat of the Sunni and Maronite Mustaqbal and LF contenders.
Commenting on the claims, the Interior Ministry explained that it had initially received a complaint of the eruption of a dispute during the vote count at the Baalbek Serail. Mashnouq then requested that the army be deployed to protect the surrounding area.
The Baalbek governor was also contacted and he denied that any dispute had taken place, said a ministry statement. He also denied that any unauthorized personnel had entered the hall where the votes were being counted.
Authorized personnel revealed that some candidates had demanded a recount, but they were met with the refusal of some vote counters, which created tensions. The governor soon intervened to calm the situation, demanding that the ballots be recounted.
In Beirut’s first electoral district, it was initially reported on Sunday that two civil society candidates, journalists Paula Yacoubian and Joumana Haddad, had scored surprise victories against the Free Patriotic Movement list.
The FPM then announced on Monday that its candidate, Antoine Pano, had won a seat instead of Haddad.
Outraged, civil society groups staged a sit-in in front of the Interior Ministry in Beirut to protest the rigged vote.
The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE), which oversees elections, revealed that one of its monitors was kicked out for over two hours from the center where the votes were being counted. She, and other monitors, were removed from the room under the pretext of a technical glitch, which raised concerns of an attempt to rig the vote in the first Beirut district.
Haddad announced that she reserves the right to appeal the vote result.
In the Chouf-Aley district, most of the candidates running on the LF, Mustaqbal and Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) list emerged victorious, prompting vote rigging suspicions from former minister Wiam Wahhab, who was running in the area.
He accused his ally, “Hezbollah”, of reneging on an agreement that would have seen Shiites vote for him. Instead, the party, in complicity with the PSP, barred Shiite villages from voting for him to ensure the success of MP Marwan Hamadeh.
Wahhab said that he will appeal the result before the Constitutional Council.
PSP sources rejected Wahhab’s claims, saying they “reflect his annoyance at his major failure in the elections and his inability to garner enough votes.”
“They also reflect the disappointment in him felt by his allies,” they told Asharq Al-Awsat.
