US observers speak about elections in Kazakhstan

Turnout was fairly high, people were voting every 2 minutes in Almaty, observers from the United States are reported by Tengrinews.kz as saying. A private business consultant Douglas Alan Townsend said that all the presidential election procedures complied with legal requirements. “We have visited six polling stations. We’ve seen stands informing people of the rules of voting and backgrounds of candidates,” he said. “We liked the polling station No. 139, the voter turnout was especially high there. We’ve seen a lot of young people in the morning. First we even thought that they were walking back from a night-long disco,” Townsend said. Another US observer Richard Weitz, a senior fellow of the Hudson University, said that he was pleasantly surprised that he happened to meet one of the presidential candidates Gani Kasymov in a polling station. “He was accompanied by a young boy (Gani Kasymov’s grandson Tengri-Kasym). The boy didn’t seem to be particularly happy, but the candidate himself was simply shining,” he told the journalists. “I noticed one more important issue,” he continued. “Many voters came to the polling stations without their IDs. But they went home to get them and returned back to their polling stations to cast the ballot,” he said. The observers said that they were also monitoring elections in Pavlodar, Karaganda and Astana. Their preliminary report on the presidential elections is expected to be published tomorrow.