Electoral Board Extends Voting Past Deadline as Manual System Bottleneck Strands Voters

Jun 1 , 2026.

The order came as dusk settled over most polling stations, turning what should have been the close of polling into a test of endurance for voters, officials and the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE).

Faced with vast queues, exhausted staff and a sudden breakdown in digital voter verification, the Board took the extraordinary step of extending voting hours beyond the official 6:00pm deadline, directing polling stations to remain open until every voter already in line had cast a ballot.

Invoking emergency powers under law passed 2021, NEBE announced that no polling station could close while eligible voters who had joined queues before the cutoff remained unserved. Electoral officials on the ground acknowledged that the worst-hit districts of Addis Abeba could continue processing ballots until midnight, while observers warned that containment delays could stretch into Tuesday morning.

The decision exposed the logistical fragility behind an election carrying heavy political stakes. What began as a technical interruption in digital verification became, in several metropolitan polling centres, a manual registration bottleneck that slowed voting to a crawl.

In Arada District, central polling coordinators abandoned digital registries and began transferring voter information onto manual paper logs. At Wereda 5, station managers separated manual ledger books into three sections to distribute the administrative burden. By nightfall, only 400 of 1,148 registered citizens had been processed, forcing an extension.

A selected Addis Abeba electoral sample compiled from field reports by Fortune staff showed the scale of unfinished voting.

Arada District, Wereda 5, had 1,148 registered voters, with 400 processed by 6:00pm. Kirkos, in the Dembel area, had 1,500 registered voters, with fewer than 750 processed by 6:00pm.

At Nifas Silk Lafto’s Gagema Kelo station, where roughly 1,500 voters were registered, the process remained unfinished, with about 300 people still queued into the evening. In Bole District’s Gerji Woreda 13, disorganisation triggered localized altercations as lines collapsed, and polling heads barred media, accredited by the Board, access while attempting to restore order.

In Kirkos District, behind Dembel City Centre, registered voters reported waits of more than four hours. All four stations were placed under extended voting.

While parts of Addis Abeba struggled under procedural paralysis, the Somali Regional State, including Jijiga, concluded voting on schedule and without notable security incidents, a performance attributed to tight coordination between local security forces and electoral executives.

In Adama, in Oromia Regional State, polling stations closed their gates and moved toward counting, but officials noted a major deficit in final turnout. They attributed the drop not to voter apathy but to infrastructure deficits, including a total suspension of public taxi services that stranded business people far from assigned precincts and online registration errors that redirected hundreds to other districts.

Inside the polling apparatus, the extended hours deepened frustration.

At Jagema Kelo in Nifas Silk Lafto, where nearly 300 people remained in line well into the evening, poll workers openly criticised the Board’s directive.

“The number of voters and the available staff are not balanced,” Sultan Juhar, an election official, told Fortune. “There should have been additional manpower, They are forcing us. We were to work for 24 hours. If more staff had been deployed at this station, the process would have been completed much faster.”

As fatigue mounted and tempers flared, federal police moved late Monday to secure polling station perimeters across Addis Abeba. Under strict directives, officers blocked new arrivals from joining queues, locking down the active voting pools to let exhausted officials clear the backlog in the dark amid growing concern over procedural credibility.

PUBLISHED ON Jun 01,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1362]