Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
22 October 2009
Maputo — The Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service, on Thursday presented the software that will be used in tabulating the votes from next week's general and provincial elections.
The software was explained at a meeting attended by political party representatives, diplomats, election observers and the media.
The software is much the same as that used for the November 2008 local elections, and STAE is confident that it is secure and that fraudulent results cannot be slipped in.
Contrary to claims made in some of the private press, the company that won the tender to design the software, Lab Soft, is a legally registered company, with its statutes published in the official gazette, the "Boletim da Republica". It is owned by two Mozambican citizens, Penicela Pedro Vasco and Mauro Rodrigues Conceicao da Costa, each of whom holds 50 per cent of the shares.
The initial stages of counting and tabulation use no computers at all. Immediately after the close of polls on 28 October, the votes are counted at the polling stations. The polling station results sheets ("editais") are then sent to the district branches of STAE.
Currently it is not feasible to put computers in all 128 districts. So at this level the STAE staff add up all the editais manually to produce a district result.
The district results, with all the original results sheets, are then sent to the 11 provincial capitals, and it is here that the computers are used, to check and correct the district results. Each polling station edital is in-put into the system twice, by two different typists. If the two versions do not coincide, the edital is rejected.
An edital will be definitively rejected by the system if it contains errors that cannot be corrected. This would be the case, for example, with a fraudulent edital claiming that more people cast votes at a polling station than were registered to vote there.
Mario Ernesto, the STAE director for organisation of elections, insisted that this would make it impossible to repeat the fraud that happened in some polling stations (notably in Changara district, Tete province) in 2004, which recorded a turnout of over 100 per cent.
In Maputo, the central offices of STAE will process the results sheets from the two diaspora constituencies (for Mozambicans living in Africa and Europe). The National Elections Commission (CNE) will, as usual, check all the votes declared invalid at the polling stations, and rescue those where it believes the voter expressed a clear preference.
The CNE will check the work from the provinces, and the authenticity of the results sheets, but it will not put them into the computers again. That work has been definitively decentralized to the provinces.
Ernesto thinks this reduces the risks of results sheets being "lost" (or more likely stolen) en route to Maputo, which happened to an alarmingly large number in 2004.
The first time the current methodology was used, in the 2008 municipal elections, Ernesto said, was also the first time in any Mozambican election that almost all the results sheets were processed. Only one edital (for the Beira municipal assembly) proved unusable.
In each provincial capital, terminals will be available where political party representatives can see the results sheets that have been input into the computers, and check them against their own copies which their polling station monitors should have obtained.
Ernesto stressed that the strongest guarantee against fraud is the presence of the party monitors at the polling stations. They have the right to obtain copies of each and every edital, which should, apart from mistakes in arithmetic, be exactly the same as the ones put into the computers.
According to Lab Soft, there is no possibility of fraudulent data being inserted into the computers before the count starts. Before the first edital is input, the computer data base is wiped clean.
Saimone Macuiana, the national agent for the main opposition party, Renamo, pointed out that in previous elections some polling station staff had refused to give Renamo monitors copies of the results sheets, and some had even called in the police when the monitors insisted on their rights.
Ernesto guaranteed nothing of the sort could happen this time. All polling station staff have received strict instructions contained in a code of conduct that they must give political party monitors copies of the results sheets and the polling station minutes. Failure to do so is an electoral offence which will lead to criminal proceedings against the polling station staff involved.
Macuiana told AIM that Renamo is aiming to put monitors in all 12,694 polling stations. He said that uncooperative officials in some provinces had tried to make it difficult for the Renamo monitors to obtain credentials, but Renamo had sorted this out with the central bodies of STAE and the National Elections Commission (CNE).
He was more worried by violent harassment of Renamo monitors, and even of Renamo-appointed members of the district electoral bodies, by supporters of the ruling Frelimo Party. Macuiana said that, although matters had improved somewhat in Changara (the worst district for this type of harassment in 2004), it was still occurring elsewhere in Tete province, including in the districts of Magoe, Zumbo and Chifunde.
Currently the Lab Soft system is being installed in the provincial counting centres, and the staff who will input the data are being trained. The entire cost of the system is 200,000 US dollars.
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