3 November 2007
Maputo — Mozambique's Constitutional Council, the body that validates election results and rules on election disputes, has warned political parties that, if they have a complaint to make, they must submit it within the deadlines laid down in the electoral legislation.
"We cannot decide outside of the parameters established by the law", declared one of the judges on the Constitutional Council, Joao Nguenha, on Friday. "If there are three days to submit an appeal, then that deadline must be respected".
Speaking at a seminar on "Local Democracy and the Electoral Process", organised by the National Elections Commission (CNE), Nguenha said that an appeal could be well grounded, but would lose all validity if submitted outside of the legal deadline.
After the 2004 general elections, the largest opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Council calling for the annulment of the elections because of serious irregularities. But one of the main reasons this appeal was unsuccessful was that it was submitted late.
Nguenha said that the media can report suspected electoral irregularities, but the Constitutional Council has no duty to intervene on the basis of such reports. Formal appeals must be submitted within the legally established period.
He added that "not all irregularities justify annulling the elections - only when the irregularities compromise the whole process, when one notes that candidate X would have won and not candidate Y".
Nguenha stressed it was also important that political party polling station monitors should try to solve some electoral disputes where they happen, at the polling stations themselves.
He said it was easier to deal with problems when and where they occur than to complain to the CNE or to the Constitutional Council.
In principle, Nguenha is right - but in 2004 not all polling stations had monitors from the opposition, and Renamo complained bitterly that in certain areas, notably Tete province, its monitors were denied credentials. It was in Tete, that dozens upon dozens of polling stations recorded an impossible turnout of 100 per cent (or more), despite an average national turnout of 36 per cent.
Another participant at the seminar, Portuguese academic Jorge Gouveia, claimed that, in the long term, Mozambique would need to introduce electronic voting, and voting in advance.
Voting in advance would allow people such as members of the armed forces, who might be away from the country on voting day, to vote in advance.
More controversial is the idea that people should be allowed to vote from a computer or a mobile phone. Currently only eight per cent of the Mozambican population have access to electricity, let alone computers. And guaranteeing that electronic votes really do come from registered Mozambican voters, and that nobody votes more than once, would pose major technical problems.
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