1 November 2009
Maputo — The Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) has accused staff at one polling station in the central city of Beira of deliberately invalidating ballot papers in Wednesday's general election, thus depriving the MDM presidential candidate and mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango, of over 100 votes.
According to a report in the latest issue of the "Mozambique Political Process Bulletin", published by AWEPA (Association of European Parliamentarians or Africa) and the Mozambican NGO CIP (Centre for Public Integrity), at polling station 0056, located in the Esturro primary school in Beira, 388 votes were cast, and 124 of them were declared invalid.
That is an extraordinarily high figure of 31.9 per cent. In the average polling station the number of invalid votes is around three per cent. Anything above five per cent should be regarded as suspicious, and anything over ten per cent is clear evidence of fraud.
For why should almost a third of the voters at the Esturro station have a sudden fit of amnesia and forget who they intended to vote for, when in most other Beira stations there was no such uncertainty?
The MDM is distributing a video which it says is from this station. It shows a pile of supposed invalid votes, and all of them have an "x" besides Simango's name and an ink blob somewhere else on the paper, thus allowing the polling station staff to argue that these voters tried to vote for two candidates.
Except that no voter in his right mind behaves like this. Nobody neatly puts a cross beside a candidate's name, and then dips his finger in ink and puts a mark beside another name.
The ink marks were obviously added during the count, by a member of staff, to bring the number of Simango votes down. Without knowing the politics of the person who behaved in this criminal fashion, it is impossible to say whether the beneficiary of this fraud was intended to be Frelimo or Renamo.
Journalists have been warning against this kind of fraud since 2004, but it was only in February of this year that the National Elections Commission (CNE) began to take it seriously. Then, in three polling stations in the northern port of Nacala, during the second round of the mayoral election, impossibly high numbers of invalid votes were recorded, in a clear attempt to damage the Renamo candidate, Manuel dos Santos (fortunately, the margin of victory for the Frelimo candidate, Chale Ossufo, was such that the fraud did not make any difference).
In the Nacala case, observers saw and named one polling station returning officer who committed this crime. The CNE admitted it had happened, and mentioned it when announcing the Nacala results. It says it sent the relevant information to the Public Prosecutor's Office for legal action - but so far no-one has been prosecuted.
Clearly, the CNE ought to restore these 124 votes to Simango, and seek the arrest of the polling official responsible. The staff cannot say they were not warned. The code of conduct included in the polling station staff manual states explicitly that altering the ballot papers in any way is a crime, and offenders can be sent to jail.
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