Maputo — As Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE) continues the time consuming task of checking every vote that was declared invalid at the polling stations during last week's general elections, clear evidence that dishonest polling station staff have tampered with votes is coming to light.

In one room where the votes are being, AIM watched CNE staff go through a series of ballots from the central province of Zambezia that had been marked for Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the main opposition party, Renamo, with either a cross or a fingerprint. Immediately above, in the square for incumbent president Armando Guebuza, someone had added another fingerprint.

For ballot after ballot after ballot, it was the same. Quite clearly the same finger had added a mark to Guebuza's box to make it look as if the voters concerned had tried to vote for two candidates.

Renamo's mistake has been to assume that when such frauds occur, the dishonest staff use the flask of indelible ink (for marking voters' fingers, so that nobody can vote twice). They don't - they clearly used the ink pads into which illiterate voters are supposed to dip their fingers when they make their mark.

The indelible ink would show up on the ballot paper as a different colour - with the passage of time, it turns a reddish-brown. Using ordinary black ink increases the likelihood that the fraud will go unnoticed. But in the Zambezia ballots that AIM observed, the fraud was quite obvious.

CNE members admit this - indeed, the CNE warned about this fraud at the time of the second round in the mayoral election in the northern port of Nacala in February. The Code of Conduct for polling station staff explicitly mentions that tampering with votes is a criminal offence. Evidently this has not been enough to dissuade dishonest staff.

In these cases, the CNE knows perfectly well that the vote has been deliberately invalidated, but feels it can do nothing about it, because the electoral law clearly states that any ballot with marks beside two or more candidates is invalid.

However, there are possibilities of prosecuting the criminals. The CNE could turn the suspect ballot papers over to the Criminal Investigation Police and ask it to check the fingerprints: all polling station staff have their fingerprints on a data base. If a fingerprint on a ballot found a match in that data base, the culprit could be arrested.

A second method is statistical. Any major tampering leaves statistical marks. In previous elections, the average number of invalid votes in any ballot box has not been more than three or four per cent of the total. Anything above five per cent is suspicious, and anything above ten per cent should be regarded as criminal.

One CNE member told AIM that there are insufficient safeguards when recruiting polling station staff. The method decreed by law is to open a tender, whereby people who wish to work in the polling stations, simply submit documents proving that they are qualified, and meet all the requirements. They are not interviewed.

Possibly interviews and background checks might weed out people unsuited for the job, and reduce the risk of fraud.

Despite the cases of deliberate invalidation of votes, it is clear that this has only happened in a minority of polling stations. Most of the votes from Zambezia that AIM observed had not been tampered with. Many were genuinely invalid - where the same hand had put crosses alongside two or all three presidential candidates, or where the cross was placed between the boxes of two candidates, making it impossible to know which candidate the voter favoured, or where the voter had signed the ballot paper (a strict rule is that any word or signature on a vote renders it invalid).

In other cases, the polling station staff had been very strict, ruling out marks other than a cross. Even ticks in a candidate's box were sometimes regarded as invalid. The CNE rescued these votes, and gave them back to the candidates for whom they had been cast.

Similarly in cases where an illiterate voter's fingerprint had strayed over the margin of the box. As long as it had not gone into the adjacent candidate's box, it was counted as valid.

The CNE have gone through all the votes declared invalid in Maputo City, Maputo Province, Gaza and Inhambane, and are now working on Zambezia and Manica.