Guidelines for Understanding, Adjudicating, and Resolving Disputes in Elections election in several wards of the state. In the meantime, Governor Oni had spent nearly two years in office. Following the decision of the Court of Appeals, the Ekiti State organized a re-run of the elections in April 2009; however, the turn-out was low and other electoral petitions were filed to the electoral complaint adjudication body concerning the re-run elections. According to observers, the delays concerning the 2007 electoral complaints have created a deep legitimacy and credibility crisis in the Ekiti State. Despite the ramifications of the two-year delay, however, the judgment was considered by some as “another milestone for the Nigeria judiciary, expressing optimism that the nation's democracy, would be better off sooner than later.”143 It should also be noted that the electoral complaint adjudication system in Nigeria has considerably improved over time. In the 1999 and 2003 elections, it took approximately five years for a petition to be adjudicated. In other cases, the complaints were simply ignored by the judges. After the 2003 elections, domestic stakeholders and international experts undertook a huge effort to strengthen the Nigerian complaints adjudication process. International election experts participated in the training of judges for the Electoral Petition Tribunals in 2006 and 2007 and introduced case management techniques, including pre-trial procedures.144 At first, the electoral experts faced resistance from the Nigerian judges. In order to overcome this resistance, the experts had to address the existing acceptability of long delays plaguing the process of election petitions. Due to the collaborative efforts of the President of the Court of Appeals, Honorable Justice Umaru Abdullahi, CON, reforms were enacted that improved the process of complaints adjudication. Following the 2007 elections, it took two years for the election tribunals to rule on the case stated above, but over 85 percent of the complaints logged were solved by May 2008. Even if there are still delays in the adjudication of complaints in Nigeria, the successes should be highlighted. The improvement of the complaints adjudication process in Nigeria has had a clear positive impact on the confidence of the public in the electoral system as a whole. 143 144 Akinyemi et al., supra note 140. IFES, Support to the Electoral Process in Nigeria: Final Report 35-39 (2009). Barry Weinberg and Judge Nikki Ann Clark participated in the training of judges for the Electoral Petition Tribunals in 2006 and 2007. Id. 52