“The official results were very within, in some cases, percentage points of the PVTs that were done by the local observers. And so it wasn’t immediately clear that these were sort of fatally flawed elections. How much worse than previous ones that had not been challenged with calls for new elections?” senior State Department officials said at the briefing today.

They called on parties to use the legal processes you built over the years to adjudicate these claims.

“Recounts, things like that were not handled as – let’s say as transparently as they should have been by the Central Election Commission, which added to the sense of suspicion about to whether the results were credible or not”, the officials said.