On 24 March 2019, Comoros held presidential and gubernatorial elections. A COMESA observation mission visited 56 of the country's 731 polling stations and included a photograph captioned “Voters waiting to vote.” The wait sat within a sequence that also included name verification, inking a finger and moving to the appropriate ballot box.
What makes this election distinctive is that the absence of queues was also treated as evidence. Contemporary reporting said African Union observers saw no waiting line at 75 percent of the polling stations they visited, using that observation as one indication of limited early turnout. At a primary school in Mitsoudje, however, voters were reported to be patiently waiting their turn.
An election queue does not simply mean that voting is slow. Places with lines and places without them can both reveal how polling stations operate and when voters arrive. In a politically contested election, COMESA's small caption about waiting became a concrete record of where the act of voting was actually under way.