In 1997, after US-backed mediation, Morocco and the Polisario Front went through what is known as the Houston Agreement which restarted the referendum process. The UN's MINURSO mission, tasked with keeping the peace and organizing the vote on independence, concluded its pre-referendum voter registration in 1999, with a preliminary list of approximately 85,000 voters.MINURSO Morocco protested the exclusion of large numbers of people it had claimed were of Western Saharan descent, who had been refused voting rights after interviews by MINURSO on-site inspection teams, and subsequently refused to accept the survey. When the kingdom launched some 130,000 individual appeals, UN officials admitted that the process had again entered a deadlock.For an extensive review of the voter registration process, especially its early stages, by a top UN responsible at the time, see Erik Jensen, Western Sahara. Anatomy of a Stalemate (Lynne Rienner, December 2004)
