AKIPRESS.COM - Liberia has begun counting votes after a day of peaceful voting in a contested presidential runoff that voters hope will lead to the country's first democratic transition in more than 70 years, Al Jazeera reports.
The delayed vote on Tuesday pitted George Weah, a 51-year-old ex-international football star and Liberian senator, against 73-year-old Joseph Boakai, who has been the country's vice president for the last 12 years.
Nearly 2.2 million people were eligible to vote in the runoff in the West African country.
Weah, who topped the first round of voting but did not secure the 50 percent needed to win outright, is heavily favoured to win the runoff.
"Vote counting is going on in polling stations across the country," Al Jazeera's Mohammed Adow, reporting from the capital Monrovia, said late on Tuesday.
"The electoral commission has two weeks to declare the results, but officials they will do so within four days."
The turnout on Tuesday was "nowhere near that of the first round held in October", our correspondent said, attributing the low numbers to a seven-week delay in holding the runoff.
Initially scheduled for November 7, the vote was delayed after the party of a third candidate filed a legal complaint alleging voter fraud and irregularities.
Both Weah, the candidate for the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), and Boakai, of the Unity Party, have promised to revive Liberia's struggling economy and kickstart infrastructure projects.
Liberians are effectively choosing a successor to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first elected female head of state, whose 12-year rule helped cement peace in Liberia after two bloody civil wars, which spanned 14 years before ending in 2003.
Henry Boyd Flomo, a spokesman for the National Elections Commission of Liberia, called the election "significant" and "historic".
"It's historic because for many years, we haven't had a sitting president willingly, democratically turn over to another person," Flomo told Al Jazeera earlier in the day.
"And it's the third consecutive election since the civil war. So it's quite important and we take it very seriously.
"What we hope is that the candidates respect the views of the voters."