When American voters went to the polls on Tuesday, 2 November 2004, a brief article in the New York Times reported that the Sudanese army had not only surrounded the camps of internally displaced people in Sudan's western region of Darfur but also was likely to relocate them forcibly, which it subsequently proceeded to do. At that time, the number of the homeless in Darfur numbered more than 1.5 million. The United Nations indicated that 70,000 people had died from disease and malnutrition in the seven preceding months. Another 200,000 refugees had fled to Chad, where they were in dire straits.