Abstract:
This study investigates the role of civil society organization particularly, the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) in election monitoring with emphasis in Enugu State during the 2007 general elections. The study became imperative following the deteriorating democratic process in Nigeria. We focused our empirical verification on two key areas viz: Whether the presence of civil society organizations and other observer missions mitigate or reduce the incidence of tension, intimidation, fraud, violence and rigging during the elections. We also sought to investigate whether the presence of these observer groups strengthen voters confidence in the election as well as whether the areas duly observed or monitored by the civil liberties organization differ significantly from fraud, rigging and other electoral vices when viewed from the areas not observed. We adopted the Marxist theory of the state. We also relied on observation method of data collection and descriptive qualitative method of data analysis. From our findings, we found out that though the presence of these observer missions does not mitigate or reduce the above incidence associated with the elections and that even the areas where the presence of Civil Liberties Organization was noticed, there seem to be no striking difference witnessed. The researcher recommends among other things that the presence of these observer missions be strengthened for wider coverage of our subsequent elections.
