Guest post from David Jandura, a student in the MA in Democracy and Governance Program. David takes a look at Sudan’s electoral system:

In the world of electoral system design, there are advantages and disadvantages to the many types of systems that exist.  It would probably be incorrect to say that any one system is “better” than another, because better is dependent upon what your priorities are.  One of the many advantages of a proportional representation, or PR system, for example, is that it does a relatively good job of ensuring that electors’ votes accurately translate into who is elected with less “wasted votes.” While it may be wrong to say which system is better, however, I don’t think it’s wrong to look at a system and question what its priorities are.  Sudan is a good case in point.  The nation claims to have a parallel system, which includes a significant amount of PR seats, yet the Sudanese have managed to create a PR tier that doesn’t actually deliver any of the advantages the system is designed to provide.

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Freedom House has recently released its analysis of the Obama Administration’s FY 2011 budget request for D&G programs (which the US Government calls Governing Justly and Democratically). Overall, it is a pretty good picture, although there are some troubling signs. Read the rest of this entry…

This is great.

Still more from Deborah on the election as seen from Juba:

Today was supposed to be the final day of polling, but because many polling stations opened late or not at all on the first two days, the government decided to extend voting through Thursday, April 15. I’ll be staying in Juba for the remainder of polling, but will only catch the beginning of counting here.

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More great stuff from Deborah:

At breakfast this morning, we learned that former President Jimmy Carter would be arriving at the Juba International Airport in a few minutes. We drove over to meet him and attended a private press conference, which might have been aired on BBC by now. His remarks reflected the same observations that we’d seen or heard from others- that the logistical difficulties of holding this election resulted in some irregularities. He noted that the 24 year gap since the last election meant that poll workers needed to be trained from scratch, and emphasized the Carter Center’s long term presence in the country. Though I know the Carter Center has observers in South Sudan, we haven’t run into any from that delegation. So far we’ve seen observers from the EU, Arab League, African Union, IGAD, and the Government of Japan. There are also thousands of domestic observers who have been trained by NDI and the Carter Center. Domestic observers are stationary and we’ve seen them in every polling station. Most are very professional and forthcoming with information, though sometimes I got the impression that they were unwilling to speak out on any serious irregularities.

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Deborah Brown, an MA student in the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown, is in Juba, Sudan as an election monitor. She emailed me her thoughts on what she has seen thus far — pix later.

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Well, I was 50-50 on whether the elections in Sudan would happen on time. They will, despite a significant boycott by opposition parties. The election is a sham, but at least it is likely to be peaceful. On to the referendum and the subsequent civil war in Southern Sudan.