ABDOU BEN Posted 13 days ago

I voted in Tunisia on Sunday, 25 October 2009. Upon my arrival at the polling station at 8:30, I was shocked to see a police van parked in the vicinity. At the court, there was a plain-clothes officer seated on a chair with a walkie-talkie in hand. The place was very clean, with walls freshly painted white and doors freshly painted "sidi Bou Said" blue. I was courteously received by the president of the of polling station. After verifying my name on a previously established list, he invited me to take ballots from the table there. There were four ballots – one for each presidential candidate – in red, yellow, brown and blue, and they were accompanied by a white envelope made of fine paper. There were seven more ballots with the lists of legislative candidates that should fit into a brown envelope made of thick paper. I took my ballots and envelopes and went into the voting booth. I left the booth and slipped my two envelopes into two different urns. They asked me to provide my signature in a box next to my name in front of the list of registered voters. They stamped the date on my voter card. The procedure for voting took place calmly and without any constraints and no one asked me for my identity card. In Tunisia, we go through checks on every street corner. They ask us for our “bitaka”, an identity card with a bar code. I think that this model is one of a kind in the world. It seems that Pasqua, the former French minister of the interior, tried to set this up in France. When the French categorically refused, he generously offered it to the Tunisians. Where is the vice in this procedure? I get the impression that I was duped. The first irregularity resides in the choice of this nearly transparent white envelope, into which we were to slip brightly coloured ballots.