When voting began in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 30 July 2006, people lined up early at polling stations in Kinshasa and the east for the country's first democratic election in more than forty years. There were 25.7 million registered voters, making it one of the largest and most logistically difficult elections supported by the United Nations.
What distinguishes these queues is that, after dictatorship and war, a vast and poorly connected country was being joined again through one political procedure. The lines expressed both hopes for peace and the difficulty of delivering an election across that territory.