4 November 2009
Maputo — Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE) has begun the task of inspecting each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of votes declared invalid at the polling stations during last Wednesday's general election.
In the last election, in 2004, the CNE had to sort through around half a million ballots. This time, it could be 600,000 or more, since while in 2004 there were two ballot papers (for the presidential and parliamentary elections), this time there are three (with the election of the provincial assemblies as well).
The polling station staff have often taken a strict line on the validity of votes, rejecting as invalid ballots where the voter has made a slight mistake in marking his cross, or used some mark other than a cross. The CNE gives all these voters a second chance, and rescues any vote where it believes that the voter has expressed a clear choice.
The process is entirely transparent. Any accredited party monitor, observer or journalist can go to the CNE offices and look over the shoulders of CNE members as they sort through piles of questionable ballots. Yet when an AIM reporter went there on Wednesday morning, he was the only journalist present, and there was so sign of any party monitors.
In the batch of presidential ballot papers that AIM observed, the great majority were undoubtedly invalid. Most common where cases where the voter had put a cross beside two or, quite often, all three of the candidates. In these cases there was no question of tampering - the crosses had clearly been made in the same way by the same person.
Then there were voters who put their cross in the margin between two candidates. Since there was no way of knowing which of these the voter favoured, such ballots were tossed into the heap of definitively invalid votes.
But where the voter had put a mark against one of the candidates which had strayed into the margin, this ballot, rejected by the polling station staff, was rescued by the CNE.
One rule the CNE adheres to strictly is that any signature or word written on the ballot paper makes the vote invalid. President Armando Guebuza, standing for re-election, suffered from this. For several voters were so enthusiastic about Guebuza that they wrote next to their cross expressions such as "You are the best!", "A good president", "Peace, love and solidarity", "Viva!", or (in English) "I love you".
Others could not resist adding disparaging comments about the other candidates. One had voted for Guebuza, but added the word "Murderer!" next to the photo of Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the former rebel movement Renamo.
A couple of voters must have thought they were stressing their point when they not only put a cross in the Guebuza box, but wrote the word "No!" in the boxes for both Dhlakama and the leader of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), Daviz Simango.
Although there can be little doubt who these voters supported, these votes were all discarded as invalid.
Other took the opportunity of the voting booth to make demands - across a couple of ballots were scrawled slogans calling for higher wages for nurses and for policemen. Some voters decided that the anonymity of the vote gave them a good opportunity to insult politicians. One had written the word "maluco" ("crazy") against all three candidates. Several called Guebuza "son of a whore", "thief" or "shark", or used obscenities ("you've f .d the country"), perhaps in the erroneous belief that the President will read all the ballot papers.
There was no sign of any fraud in the ballot papers in this batch. The opposition claims that many votes for Dhlakama and Simango were deliberately invalidated by dishonest polling station staff adding a daub of ink to the ballots to make it seem as if the voters concerned tried to vote for two candidates.
But all the ballots so far reconsidered by the CNE come from Maputo city and province, where this type of fraud has not been reported.
Both Renamo and the MDM claim that the crooking polling station staff used the flasks of indelible ink (intended to mark voters' fingers so that no-one can vote twice) for the fraud. A senior official from STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat), the executive branch of the CNE, told AIM this would not work, since the indelible ink leaves a different colour on paper from normal ink.
Over time, the indelible ink turns brownish, and is thus easily detectable. Any votes tampered with in this way would be returned to the candidate for whom they were intended, the STAE official said.
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