On 5 September 2021, almost all polling stations in São Tomé and Príncipe opened as scheduled at 7 a.m. for the presidential runoff. Reporting from a station in the capital, the Lusa news agency recorded that more than a dozen voters were still waiting their turn twenty minutes after opening. Just over 92,000 people were registered to vote nationwide.
Even in a small island state, each ballot is processed one person at a time. The short line from identification to ballot paper and ballot box breaks a national institution into a sequence of individual bodies. Because the record describes only a little more than a dozen people rather than a spectacular crowd, it captures the ordinary physical texture of election administration.
The source confirms voters waiting their turn on one particular morning and the opening of the polling stations. It does not establish a long wait or the political motives of individual voters, and this entry does not invent either.