Ugandan opposition says troops raid its offices amid election challenge

KAMPALA (Reuters) – Bobi Wine, leader of Uganda’s main opposition party, said troops raided its headquarters on Monday as staff tried to prepare a legal challenge to President Yoweri Museveni’s declared victory in an election last week.

Wine, himself under house arrest, said party leaders were now on the run. “Our party office has been raided by the military and been cordoned off,” Wine told Reuters. “Everybody is being pursued.”

Police spokesman Patrick Onyango said the National Unity Platform (NUP) office had been cordoned off for security reasons, but he gave no more details and did not say if troops had entered the premises.

Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, said later on Twitter that the U.S. ambassador to Uganda was sent away from his gate after she tried to visit him. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. Embassy on the planned visit.

The electoral commission declared incumbent Museveni the winner of the Jan. 14 election on Saturday, triggering protests in two areas. Wine, a former pop star-turned-legislator, came second and accused Museveni of winning by fraud.

In the election, where voters were also choosing members of parliament, Wine’s NUP won 61 seats. Five other opposition parties won 48 seats, giving opposition lawmakers in the next House 109 in total, a government statement said on Monday. The ruling party won 316 seats.

Wine had appealed to youth to vote out Museveni, a 76-year-old in power since 1986. Wine’s songs have frequently criticized Museveni for corruption and nepotism, accusations he denies.

Museveni, one of Africa’s longest-ruling leaders, has dismissed the allegations of fraud and said the election may turn out to be the “most cheating-free” in Ugandan history.

The government wanted to disrupt documentation of voting fraud, NUP spokesman Joel Ssenyonyi said.

“They don’t want work to continue at our offices because they know that we are putting together evidence to show the world how much of a fraudster Museveni is.”

The campaign and election were marked by a deadly crackdown by security forces on opposition supporters and an internet shutdown. In one week of protests in November, at least 54 people died.

The government said opposition members and their supporters had been breaking public order laws and COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings. On Monday the government started to partially restore internet access.

The United States and Britain have called for investigations into reports of fraud and other election issues.

INCIDENT

Wine called for the military to release him from house arrest, saying his home was not a legally recognized detention center. He accused soldiers of assaulting his wife when she went into their garden.

“The soldiers were pulling her by the breasts,” he said, adding that the incident was filmed on video and she would share it when social media services were restored.

Military spokeswoman Brigadier Flavia Byekwaso said she was unaware of the incident.

The law gives petitioners 20 days after results are declared to challenge them in the Supreme Court. Wine said he wanted to meet with his party to decide on a strategy that could include peaceful protests.

But the military has surrounded Wine’s home in Kampala since Thursday, saying it is for his own safety.

Wine’s lawyers were denied access on Monday. One legislator for Wine’s party said he was beaten up by security forces when he tried to enter this weekend.

The NUP’s Ssenyonyi said such attacks, including on the party’s polling agents, were being carried out to cripple the court challenge.

At least 110 polling agents from Wine’s party have been arrested since the eve of the election. Some 223 suspects have been arrested during the election on offences that include assault, intimidation and voter bribery, police said.

(Reporting by Nairobi Newsroom; Writing by Duncan Miriri; Editing by George Obulutsa and Mark Heinrich)

As Giuliani argues for Trump, Pennsylvania asks judge to toss election challenge

By Jan Wolfe and Brad Heath

(Reuters) – Lawyers for Pennsylvania asked a judge on Tuesday to dismiss Donald Trump’s bid to block President-elect Joe Biden from being certified as the victor in the state as the Republican president, with personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani arguing for him, pursued a long-shot legal challenge to his U.S. election loss.

Giuliani, the former New York mayor, took a key role in spearheading Trump’s case before U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A loss in the case would likely doom Trump’s already-remote prospects of altering the election’s outcome.

There was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud” in the election, Giuliani told Brann, but provided little evidence to back up that claim.

Daniel Donovan, a lawyer for Pennsylvania’s top election official, said Trump’s campaign did not allege irregularities that would change the outcome in the state.

The Trump campaign on Sunday narrowed the Pennsylvania case to focus on a claim that voters in the state were improperly allowed to fix ballots that had been rejected because of technical errors such as missing a “secrecy envelope.”

Pennsylvania officials have said a small number of ballots were fixed. Trump’s campaign, however, is asking Brann to halt certification of Biden’s victory in the state. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is due to certify the election results next Monday, meaning Brann is expected to rule quickly.

Biden, due to take office on Jan. 20, is projected to have won the state by more than 70,000 votes, giving him 49.9% of the state’s votes to 48.8% for Trump.

Hours before the hearing, Brann allowed Giuliani to formally appear in the case. Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday that Giuliani was spearheading a new team to pursue the campaign’s legal fight.

Trump, the first U.S. president to lose a re-election bid since 1992, has called the election “rigged,” has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread voting fraud and has falsely claimed victory. State election officials around the country have said they have found no such fraud.

Biden clinched the election by winning Pennsylvania to put him over the 270 state-by-state electoral votes needed. Biden, a Democrat, won 306 Electoral College votes overall to the Republican Trumps 232, Edison Research said on Friday.

Giuliani said there was a history of voter fraud in large U.S. cities, adding, without offering evidence, that the expansion of mail-in voting in 2020 allowed officials to take advantage of a public health crisis, the coronavirus pandemic.

Donovan said the Trump campaign’s alleged injuries are “speculative” and “cannot give them standing in federal court.”

On Monday, three lawyers representing the Trump campaign asked to withdraw from the case, saying the campaign consented to the move but offering little explanation. Brann allowed two of the three to drop out.

The campaign and Trump supporters have filed lawsuits in multiple states challenging the Nov. 3 election result but have yet to overturn any votes. Any remote hope of reversing the election’s outcome hangs on Pennsylvania.

Legal experts have said the lawsuits stand little chance of changing the outcome. A senior Biden legal adviser has dismissed the litigation as “theatrics, not really lawsuits.”

The Trump campaign has had difficulty retaining legal counsel to take on its post-election challenges. Last week, lawyers at the firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from representing the campaign in the Pennsylvania suit.

Another firm, Snell & Wilmer, withdrew on Tuesday from a lawsuit alleging that Arizona’s Maricopa County incorrectly rejected some votes cast on Election Day.

In the Pennsylvania lawsuit, the Trump campaign alleges Democratic-leaning counties unlawfully identified mail-in ballots before Election Day that had defects so that voters could fix, or “cure,” them.

Pennsylvania officials sought to have the lawsuit thrown out, saying all of the state’s counties were permitted to inform residents if their mail-in ballots were deficient, even if it was not mandatory for them to do so.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Tom Hals and Nate Raymond; Editing by Will Dunham, Lincoln Feast, Howard Goller and Noeleen Walder)

Erdogan’s AK Party challenges Istanbul, Ankara election results

Supporters of Ekrem Imamoglu, main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for mayor of Istanbul, wait for him to visit Anitkabir, the mausoleum of modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in Ankara, Turkey, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

By Daren Butler and Tuvan Gumrukcu

ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) – President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has submitted objections to local election results in all districts of Istanbul and Ankara, party officials said on Tuesday, after results showed the opposition earned narrow victories in both cities.

The AK Party is on track to lose control of what are Turkey’s two biggest cities, its commercial hub of Istanbul and the capital Ankara, in a surprise election setback that may complicate Erdogan’s plans to combat recession.

In Istanbul, the mayoral candidate of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Ekrem Imamoglu, and his AKP rival, ex-prime minister Binali Yildirim, both said on Monday Imamoglu was around 25,000 votes ahead. Istanbul has an estimated total population of 15 million.

The AKP had previously said it would use its right to object to the results where there were voting irregularities, adding that the errors at the ballots had affected the outcome.

On Tuesday, Bayram Senocak, the AKP’s Istanbul head said that objections had been submitted by the 3 p.m. (1200 GMT) deadline for appeals, and added that legal action would be taken against electoral officials who made the errors.

“We have submitted all our appeals to the district electoral councils,” Senocak said, as he waved ballot records in which he said vote count irregularities could be seen.

An AKP deputy chairman later said the difference between Imamoglu and Yildirim was down to 20,509 votes and would keep falling as a result of their appeals. He said the elections were “the biggest blemish in Turkish democratic history.”

The CHP’s Istanbul head Canan Kaftancioglu said her party submitted objections in 22 districts, adding they expected to receive 4,960 more votes after the appeals were resolved.

“They are trying to steal the will of the people as it was reflected in the ballots,” she told reporters in Istanbul.

The CHP’s Imamoglu said on Tuesday he was saddened by the AKP failure to congratulate him after the election board count put him ahead.

“I’m watching Mr Binali Yildirim with regret. You were a minister of this nation, the parliament speaker and a prime minister,” Imamoglu said in Istanbul. “What could be more noble than congratulating?”

“The world is watching us with shame right now. We are ready to manage the big city of Istanbul. Let go and congratulate us with honor, so we can do our job,” he said.

“MOMENT OF BEGINNING”

Ahead of the elections, the CHP had formed an electoral alliance with the Iyi (Good) Party to rival that of the AKP and their nationalist MHP partners. The alliances nominated joint candidates in certain cities, including Ankara and Istanbul.

Imamoglu, who laid a wreath at the mausoleum of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in Ankara, later went to CHP headquarters to meet Mansur Yavas, the opposition’s candidate in the capital. Speaking at the CHP building, Imamoglu said the elections marked a “moment of beginning” for Turkey.

In Ankara, Yavas received 50.9 percent of votes, ahead of his AKP rival and former minister Mehmet Ozhaseki in Sunday’s local elections by nearly 4 percentage points. The AKP said it had also submitted objections to results across Ankara.

Defeats in Ankara and Istanbul would be a significant setback for Erdogan, who has dominated Turkish politics for more than 16 years. He had campaigned relentlessly ahead of the vote, describing it as a “matter of survival” for the country.

Erdogan’s political success has rested on years of stellar economic growth in Turkey, but an economic recession that has brought surging inflation and unemployment and a plunging lira currency have taken their toll on his popularity.

Uncertainty generated by the local elections has added to pressure on the lira, which weakened sharply last week as a lack of confidence in the currency among Turks led them to snap up record holdings of dollars and gold.

On Tuesday the lira weakened more than 2 percent against the dollar on concerns about tensions with the United States after it halted delivery to Turkey of equipment related to the F-35 fighter aircraft.

(Reporting by Ezgi Erkoyun and by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Additional reporting by Ece Toksabay; Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu and Daren Butler; Editing by Dominic Evans. Gareth Jones, William Maclean)