KINSHASA, Congo ? For the past two days, Chantal Pande has set her alarm for 4:30 a.m., putting on her makeup and arriving before dawn at the polling station where she's been assigned to vote in Congo's momentous election.
Each day she waited from first light until nightfall, queuing at one of the 485 vote centers that as of Wednesday still had not received ballots in this giant nation attempting to organize its first election since the end of its civil war.
The government failed to print enough ballots, and even those that were printed were not delivered in time, causing millions of voters to be turned away.
"I want to vote. I made my choice and I want to express it. It's my right," said the unemployed mother of four, who sat inside a deserted polling station clasping a yellow purse in which she had carefully folded her voting card. "I've been here everyday since 5. I'm discouraged. I'm losing hope. Do you think they'll bring the ballots?"
Already four of the 11 presidential candidates have called for the vote to be annulled. And in numerous rural areas, poll workers have been attacked and voting centers have been set on fire. Riot police have fought back angry mobs with tear gas including outside the cinderblock school where Pande is registered.
The vote that began Monday is the first to be organized by the Congolese government instead of the international community. The election was supposed to mark another step toward peace, but if the results are not accepted by the population analysts fear it could drag Congo back into conflict.
Observers say they have documented irregularities and possible instances of attempted fraud, but that it's too early to say whether these anomalies are widespread enough to change the election's outcome.
John Stremlau, who is helping lead The Carter Center's election observation mission, said the candidates were jumping the gun by calling for an annulment.
"It's too early to say what the pattern looks like. You don't want to be driven by anecdotes," he said. "Is it systemic? Or is just bad management? At the moment, it would appear to be the product of a rushed election with enormous complexity."
Congo's election has been a massive logistical challenge: The nation is as large as Western Europe, only 2 percent of the roads are paved, and ballot boxes needed to be transported by foot on the heads of porters.
Especially worrying, though, is the inflammatory rhetoric of opposition leaders who are already calling the vote fraudulent.
On Wednesday, another three candidates signed a statement calling for the vote to be annulled, joining politician Vital Kamerhe, the former speaker of parliament who issued a public letter demanding the ballot be canceled.
Election commission president Daniel Ngoy Mulunda said that more than 99 percent of voting districts had functioned normally, and that only 485 out of 61,380 polling stations had been unable to complete voting due to missing ballots.
It might not be a large number overall, but the drama is playing out in places like the Boniface elementary school, a cinderblock structure that serves as the central voting bureau in one of the capital's slums.
One of the classrooms' doors, a section of the school's wall and the wooden bunks have been destroyed by voters who finally reached the boiling point Tuesday.
A full two days had passed, and porters finally arrived with bundles of ballots on their heads, skirting a pool of black mud that prevented the election commission from coming by car.
The crowd cheered, but when election officials counted what the porters had brought, they found just 600 ballots for 39 voting bureaus ? an amount equal to 15 ballots for each polling station that is supposed to serve 300 registered voters.
The president of the voting district, Jacques Kabombo, came out to explain to the crowd that they could not start voting since they would run out of ballots immediately.
He says that in the scuffle that ensued, he thought he was going to get lynched.
"Every time I called the election commission, they said wait _no wait. It's coming, it's coming," he said. "The people rebelled. They pulled apart the wall of the school with their hands. I even lost the shoes on my feet."
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Associated Press writers Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa, Congo, and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.
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