6 November 2009
Maputo — Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE) is continuing to sort through hundreds of thousands of votes declared invalid at the polling stations during last week's general and provincial elections.
This "requalification" of the invalid votes began on Tuesday, and is not expected to be complete before Sunday. As of midday Friday the boxes full of supposedly invalid votes had still not arrived in Maputo from three provinces (Nampula, Tete and Cabo Delgado).
Since the 13 members of the CNE cannot handle this daunting task on their own, they have called on the Maputo city and provincial elections commissions to provide assistance. The sorting is absolutely transparent - accredited political party monitors, observers and journalists can watch.
But on all AIM's visits to the sorting rooms, there has not been a single political party monitor present, from the ruling Frelimo Party, or from any of the opposition parties.
The great majority of votes declared invalid by the polling station staff are indeed invalid. There is no question that when a voter has put crosses beside all three presidential candidates, or has written "Nao quero!" ("I don't want you") against all three names, that vote is invalid.
The CNE also strictly applies the rule that no words or signatures are allowed. So when, on a ballot from Niassa province, a fan of Beira mayor Daviz Simango, had put a cross on Simango's box, but also scrawled the word "macaco" (monkey) in the box for Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, that vote was rejected.
Other decisions are more difficult. Illiterate voters who vote with an inky fingerprint rather than a pen frequently do not put their mark inside the candidate's box. Is a mark on the margin to the right of the box for incumbent president Armando Guebuza a valid vote? Or a vote at the bottom of the ballot paper under Dhlakama's name? Or one at the top of the paper above Simango?
The CNE appears to work on the basis that if such marks are nearly touching the candidate's box the votes are valid, but if they are right at the edge of the ballot paper they are not.
As with votes from Zambezia on Thursday, so on Friday with the Niassa ballots, AIM saw example of votes that had clearly been tampered with. These were cases where the voter had put a cross beside Dhlakama's name, but somebody else, presumably a dishonest member of the polling station staff, had added an inky fingerprint in Guebuza's box to make it look as if the voter had tried to vote for two candidates.
In some cases the fraudsters had used the indelible ink, the sole legitimate purpose of which is to mark departing voters' fingers so that nobody can vote twice. The indelible ink can be easily recognised since it leaves a reddish-brown mark, not a black one.
Two days ago a senior official from STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat), the executive branch of the CNE, told AIM that such votes would be recovered and given to the candidate for whom they were intended. But the Niassa votes were not rescued, but remained invalid.
Although no voter has access to the indelible ink, and so, if it appears on the ballot paper somebody else must have put it there, the CNE members were blindly following the legal dictate that any vote with marks beside two names is invalid.
The bundles of votes declared invalid at the polling stations also include votes, for all three presidential candidates, which are clearly valid. Why should anybody working at a polling station throw a ballot unequivocally marked for Guebuza, Dhlakama, or Simango into the pile of invalid papers?
In some cases no doubt fatigue after a long day's work and the poor light at many of the stations account for such mistakes. In other cases, the staff are being ultra-strict and rejecting any pen mark other than a cross. AIM saw CNE members recovering votes that were marked with ticks or just a line through the candidate's box.
But other cases are more sinister. A journalist from the "Mozambique Political Process Bulletin" reports seeing a batch of 175 parliamentary votes from the city of Quelimane, all clearly and unequivocally marked for Frelimo, among the invalid ballots. A few votes can end up in the wrong pile because of tiredness and bad light - but to claim that misplacing 175 votes, one after another, was just a mistake strains credibility.
It is probable that this is a ploy to have the votes counted twice. As the Bulletin remarks "it seems likely that as the ballot papers were being put in their plastic bags at 3 am in the dark of some polling station, someone simply took a large handful of Frelimo ballot papers and put them in the bag for invalid votes instead. No one would ever know, because valid ballot papers are never checked again, but valid papers in the bag for invalid votes are sure to be counted - thus these 175 ballot papers were probably counted twice".
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