On 14 April, Lebanon held parliamentary by-elections in Tripoli to fill in the vacant fifth Sunni seat, which was annulled by the Constitutional Council following a successful challenge submitted after the parliamentary elections in 2018.
The voter turnout in Tripoli reached 13.6% where the number of registered voters was 241,534. The citizens of Tripoli voted based on the majoritarian system, as indicated in the article 43 of the Parliamentary Electoral Law No 44/2017 and used a uniformed pre-printed ballot paper which comprised 8 candidates.
Within less than 2 months, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Lebanese Elections Assistance Project (LEAP), funded by the European Union and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), provided technical support to the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities (MoIM) in preparing and conducting the parliamentary by elections in Tripoli.
UNDP provided technical assistance to the elections’ operations and management, including training of polling officials, operating the candidates’ registration system, establishing a hotline call center to support the electoral operations room, producing voter information campaign, designing and procuring electoral and voting procedures materials for the polling stations and centers such as voting booths, envelopes, vests, caps, training manuals, poster,s amongst others.
UNDP also supported the Supervisory Commission for Elections in monitoring the media and the candidates’ electoral campaigns, managing the accreditation process, updating the Commission’s page on the official elections’ website as well as strengthening the Commission’s institutional capacity.
It is worth noting that the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities acknowledged the contribution of UNDP and EU for the successful conduct of these elections.
