Global Times

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An election official shows a ballot during vote counting at a polling station in Bamako on Sunday after the second round of Mali’s presidenti­al elections. Malians voted in a presidenti­al runoff likely to re-elect President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita despite criticism of his handling of the country’s security crisis and allegation­s of election fraud

Vote counting was underway across Mali on Monday after a tense presidenti­al runoff marked by violence, polling station closures and low turnout.

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, 73, is the clear frontrunne­r in a reprise of his face off against former finance minister Soumaila Cisse, 68.

In a reminder of the jihadist threat that was a major campaign issue, the overseer of a polling station in Arkodia, in the northern region of Timbuktu, was shot dead by armed Islamist militants, local officials said.

On the eve of voting, authoritie­s said they had disrupted a plot to carry out “targeted attacks” in the capital Bamako.

More than a hundred other stations in the restive north and center were closed by security fears, according to local monitors POCIM (the Mali Citizen Observatio­n Pool), which had more than 2,000 observers deployed around the country.

The closure figure compares with a total of 23,000 polling stations nationwide and several hundred closures in the first round.

Turnout was just 22.38 percent, POCIM said. Participat­ion in the first round was 42.7 percent.

The European Union’s observer mission said Monday it was able to get to the northern town of Gao, but not to Timbuktu or Kidal, also in the north, or to Mopti in the center.

But in 300 polling stations that its observers visited, “we didn’t see any major incident,” the mission’s leader, Cecile Kyenge said.

In the first-round vote on July 29, Keita was clearly ahead, with 42 percent against 18 percent for Cisse.

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