This past Monday was the second time Belay Zerihun, a second-time voter, has had to stand in a long queue over the past couple of months. The first time was in early May when he went to get his voter ID card during the extended registration period. He recalled standing for hours in line. On the morning of June 21, 2021, he arrived at Polling Station 34 of Nefas Silk Lafto District, in the neighbourhood known as Haile Garment, to cast his ballot in the sixth national elections after the current constitutional order was installed in the mid-1990s.

The lines were so long that he and many voters could not see the stations from where they stood.

Long queues were seen stretching out from polling stations all over Addis Abeba and the rest of the country, and Belay was lined up to vote outside a premise that incorporated no less than three separate polling stations. Each was designed by the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) to accommodate up to 1,500 voters.

Belay endured, cast his ballot despite aching legs and heavy rainfall, and managed to make it home by 5pm, eight hours later.

The long queues were indicative of a strong voter turnout and evidence of a public determined to have their voices heard. However, there were also other reasons for the lines too.

Belay saw the process hampered as only one poll worker was in charge of cross-checking names from the station's registry, an exercise that slowed things down. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lack of poll workers was just one among a series of setbacks faced by the electoral on election day. In the week leading up to the polling date, the Board had trained 244,000 poll workers to be deployed in groups of five to the 48,000 stations across the country but Tigray, Somali and Harari regional states. Attributed to technical glitches and insecurities, these are some of the 102 constituencies where the Board found it impossible to conduct elections last week.

Where it did, some of the poll workers failed to show up to their assigned stations. Voting had to go on nonetheless, under-staffed.

The majority of polling stations were operating under capacity, in some cases even having to seek assistance from observers representing civil society organisations. The African Union Election Observation Mission, which testified the elections to be "orderly, peaceful and credible", noted similar issues. Of the 22 stations it monitored, 13 were opened late due to tardiness from poll workers and delays in the deliveries of election materials. Of the 249 stations the Mission visited over the course of the day, 80pc had long queues.

Electoral officials were compelled to push polls closing hours to 9pm. Yet, a significant number of polls in the capital were still seeing long queues. In some cases, such as a polling station in Nifas Silk Lafto District, the last voters were around as late as 11pm. Others had voters pouring in until after midnight.

Voters in some areas had to wait for the following day to cast their ballots. Nineteen constituencies in Sidama Regional State were made to vote on Tuesday after electoral officials went short of ballot papers. The same was true for voters in Gambella Regional State.

In three constituencies of the Amhara Regional State, including Dembiya, voting was called off entirely after ballot boxes were found opened the day before the polling date. Officials at the Board have since announced that elections there will be held on September 6, 2021, along with 69 other constituencies.

Despite widespread apprehension before the polling date, the elections last week went largely peaceful (where they took place) and were marked by a high turnout of the nearly 40 million voters registered. Redwan Hussien, state minister for Foreign Affairs, described the elections on his social media posting as a "spectacular" event "except few and understandable technical glitches."

These exceptions include the killing of a security officers in in Dembiya Wereda,central Gonder. Mekuanint Mekete, head of the electoral board in the Amhara regional office, was unable to provide details on the killing, for he had yet to receive a full report on the incident.

In the Hamer area of the Southern regional state, a representative of the Hibir Ethiopia Democratic Party (Hibir) was found beaten to death in the aftermath of the polling date.

"We've reported the incident to security officials in the region," said Girma Bekele, leader of the party, who has a history of political activism in the region for nearly three decades. "We're following the developments."

Security concerns were so alarming, four percent of the polling stations 2,200 monitors from the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Society Organisations for Election (CECOE) had visited were inside police stations, army barracks, and the premises of political party offices. The Coalition has deployed 3,000 monitors across the country, the largest contingent of poll observers from the African Union and the East African Joint Force. Leaders of the Coalition disclosed their monitors encountered campaigning in and around 12pc of the polling stations, contrary to the Board’s regulations. They have also observed at least 86 incidents where individuals unauthorised were present in polling stations and alleged that 10pc of the booths were not sufficiently secretive. Unauthorised interventions were seen in one percent of the stations where monitors visited during ballot counting, according to the Coalition.

Contending political parties, too, remained watchful of the electoral process, collecting complaints from their own representatives in the field.

Abebe Akalu is secretary of the Ethiopians for Citizenship & Social Justice (EZEMA), an opposition that had fielded the second largest candidates of the 9,300 who battled on the electoral front last week. His party has lodged 410 complaints before the electoral board, claiming some of its 1,540 candidates were affected.

“If the issues reported to the Board are not addressed, we'll turn to the law,” Abebe said at a press briefing EZEMA leaders gave two days following the polls.

Some of these complaints have to do with the vote-counting and allegations that some polling stations were providing voters with ballot papers on which the photos and names of candidates were not visible, according to Yeshiwas Assefa, chairman of EZEMA.

“These elections are part of the country’s transformation, not the end,” Yeshiwas said, commenting on the elections in general.

For Ethiopia's development partners, including the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and Canada, elections on their own cannot transform the country's politics or resolve the challenges it faces. A full-blown civil war is underway in the Tigray Regional State, and five regional states are under the spell of instability, including a growing insurgency in western Wellega of the Oromia Regional State. Two main opposition parties—the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF)—have boycotted the elections after their leaders, Jawar Mohammed and Bekele Gerba, were jailed, offices shut down, and many in their rank and file incarcerated. Although unhindered from taking part in the elections, the opposition Balderas has its leaders, including Eskinder Nega, remain under custody battling charges of alleged involvement in terrorism.