Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, Renamo, on Friday presented a stack of what it claimed were 950 voter cards of people who had not been allowed to vote in the northern district of Angoche during the 28 October general elections.

Ivone Soares, the spokesperson for the Renamo election office, told a Maputo press conference that the cards belonged to people who were unable to vote because they found that their names were not on the electoral register,

"These cards are further proof that the elections were a farce", declared Soares. "We always said that thousands of voters were prevented from voting because their names were not on the electoral register".

Soares claimed that these voters had all voluntarily delivered their cards to a Renamo office in Angoche.

Reporters pointed out that the mere presence of the cards on a table in Maputo is no proof that these people did not vote. What was to stop a Renamo supporter in Angoche voting, and them delivering his card to the local Renamo office and claiming that he had been prevented from voting?

"Renamo trusts in the Mozambican people", replied Soares. "If citizens deliver their cards to Renamo, repudiating the fact that they were prevented from voting, then Renamo has to trust the Mozambicans".

There is a way of checking whether these people are on the register - Renamo could show the cards to STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) and ask it to see whether the card numbers can be found in the computerized data base of the electorate. But Renamo has not carried out this basic check, and so its claim is worthless.

STAE admits that human error by the voter registration brigades means that occasionally a voter card is issued and the name of the voter is not properly transcribed into the voters' roll. For this reason, the electoral registers are publicly displayed after each voter registration exercise, so that voters can demand that any mistakes or omissions be corrected. However, most voters either do not know about this, or do not have the time or money to travel to where the registers are displayed.

Renamo claims that when names are omitted from the register that is a type of fraud. That assumes that the voter registration brigades are telepathic and know which people will vote for Renamo and which for Frelimo.

Soares also claimed that Frelimo had collected voter cards prior to the election so that people could not vote. But why should any Renamo supporter surrender his or her voter card to their political adversaries?

Soares also alleged that the vast majority of votes declared invalid at the polling stations were votes cast for Renamo which were deliberately invalidated by dishonest staff adding a second mark to the ballot paper.

Renamo cannot possibly know this, because Renamo has taken no interest in the invalid votes which are currently being inspected by the National Elections Commission (CNE). The "requalification" of the invalid votes, in which the CNE looks at each and every vote declared invalid at the polling stations, to see if any can be rescued, is entirely transparent.

Accredited political party monitors, observers and journalists can watch over the shoulders of the CNE as it sorts through hundreds of thousands of invalid votes. On three consecutive days, AIM visited the sorting rooms, staying there for lengthy periods. Nobody from Renamo (or from any other political party) was there on any of these occasions.

And AIM can confirm that, although cases of the fraud described by Soares certainly exist, the bulk of the invalid votes are indeed invalid - votes where the voter has scrawled words of insult or praise, votes where the mark is in between the boxes of two candidates, votes where crosses appear, in clearly the same hand, against two or more candidates.

Soares insisted that Renamo had not lost the elections, despite the gap of over two million votes between incumbent president Armando Guebuza and Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama.

She demanded the establishment of a "transitional government", an entirely new registration of the electorate and new elections.

In the northernmost province of Niassa, the Renamo provincial delegate, Hilario Waite, also denounced the elections. According to a report in the Beira daily "Diario de Mocambique", Waite said the results had been drawn up by the Frelimo Central Committee.

He claimed that voter registration had not reached many areas of Niassa where the opposition was strong, and that STAE had carried out a "parallel registration" through community leaders and neighbourhood secretaries linked to Frelimo. According to this conspiracy theory, the neighbourhood secretaries recognised the names of opposition supporters and had their names eliminated from the electoral registers.

In fact, Niassa has a registered electorate of 544,070 voters - which is many more than STAE had initially expected. In update of the registers in June-July this year, 36,031 new voters were registered in Niassa, which was 133 per cent of STAE's initial target. This successful registration would have been impossible if large areas of the province had been omitted.

Just as Soares had alleged for Angoche, Waite claimed that many Niassa citizens had voter cards, but found their names were not on the register "just to achieve the objectives of the Frelimo Party Central Committee".

Waite also alleged that "many" of Renamo's polling station monitors were expelled from the polling stations, arrested and tortured, though he did not cite any specific examples. Renamo has made similar allegations in most provinces. But when AIM raised this with the head of the CNE's legal department, Antonio Chipanga, he said that at no time had Renamo ever informed the CNE, or the district and provincial elections commissions, of such arrests.

Political party monitors enjoy limited immunity. They cannot be arrested inside polling stations unless caught in the act of committing a crime. But this immunity can only be enforced if the political parties concerned inform the electoral bodies of any violations.