After an unscheduled daylong ballot extension that prompted some opposition candidates to cry foul and call for a rerun, the CENI election commission released a few early results, adding that it will announce the rest from Saturday.
The provisional results from a few thousand diaspora votes indicate that President Felix Tshisekedi has a comfortable lead over challengers.
At a news conference in Kinshasa, CENI President Denis Kadima again rejected criticism by the opposition and independent observers that the extended vote had been chaotic and lacked credibility.
Opposition presidential candidate Moise Katumbi, whose team has been monitoring the vote count, said on Thursday that results so far showed him in the lead.
There are 44 million registered voters and elections have often provoked unrest in Central Africa’s most populous country.
The presidential and legislative elections on Wednesday were disrupted by delays in delivering election materials and malfunctioning equipment.
Voters also struggled to find their names on registers, while violence interrupted the voting process in other regions.
With the delay, protests broke out in eastern Lubero territory on Friday where a failure to deploy voting materials to remote areas left 17,000 people unable to cast their vote. A CENI representative for Lubero told Reuters voting would be held on Saturday.
The Carter Center, a U.S. election monitoring group, noted on Friday, “there was a lack of confidence in the process, stemming in part from previous elections, as well as from gaps in transparency, especially regarding the voter register.”
Voting for some was extended into Thursday, prompting five opposition presidential candidates to call for a new election, saying the extension was unconstitutional.
Both opposition and Congolese independent observer bodies have said the credibility of results will be impacted by how the voting started.
CENI set up a results center in Kinshasa called Basolo — “Truth” in the Lingala language — where it says results from each polling station will be shared publicly as they come in. This has been a key demand of the opposition and civil society, who say the lack of transparency in previous elections enabled fraud.
CENI has set a December 31 deadline for the release of full provisional results, but it is not clear if this will change because of the unexpected voting extension.
The rowdy election day capped a campaign that was also marred by violence that led to the deaths of at least 19 people, according to figures from the Carter Center.