9 November 2009
Maputo — Felisberto Naife, the general director of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service, on Monday categorically denied opposition claims that many of the electoral registers used during the 28 October general elections were forged.
Both the main opposition party, Renamo, and the breakaway MDM (Mozambique Democratic Movement) have spoken of "falsified" registers, which deliberately omitted the names of opposition supporters.
Perhaps the most extreme claim came the Renamo delegate in the northernmost province of Niassa, Hilario Waite, who alleged that there had been a "parallel registration" through community leaders and neighbourhood secretaries linked to the ruling Frelimo Party. He claimed that the secretaries recognised the names of opposition supporters and had their names eliminated from the registers.
Naife told AIM that this was completely impossible. When the voter registration brigades completed this year's update of the registers, on 29 July, their computerized lists of names and voter card numbers were delivered, first to the district branches of STAE and then to the STAE provincial offices, where the new names and numbers were added to the existing data base.
The updated registers then went back to the district STAE branches to check if they were in order. In the district capitals, the lists were posted publicly so that voters could see whether their names had been omitted.
Furthermore, the computers used in voter registration had a timing device. After 29 July, no names could be added or deleted, and no new voter cards could be printed. So even if anyone had illicitly acquired some of the computers after 29 July, they could not have used them to carry out any "parallel registration".
"After 29 July, you couldn't print anything on those computers", stressed Naife. "And they were all collected from the registration brigades".
He admitted that the brigades made mistakes, and that some voters' names were left off the lists. But this was human error, and nobody deliberately tried to exclude citizens from the voters' roll, he insisted.
Asked about the 950 voter cards displayed by Renamo on Friday, allegedly belonging to people in the northern district of Angoche who had been unable to vote because their names were not on the registers, Naife said that at no time had Renamo contacted STAE - Angoche district STAE, Nampula provincial STAE, or the STAE Maputo headquarters - about this claim.
Since the voters' roll is fully computerized, it would have been possible to check the numbers of the 950 cards against the data base to see if these voters were or were not on the registers.
"It is possible that people's names are not on the list", said Naife. "One or other name may have been omitted. But the political parties should collaborate with STAE on solving problems".
Naife also denied claims that there were polling stations that had no registers, and so no-one could vote there. As far as he was aware, all the polling stations had opened, though there were a few that had opened very late.
STAE had avoided the disgraceful scenes of the last elections in 2004, when registers for a polling station in one province ended up in a different province. This time, production of the registers had been decentralized to provincial level, and then the registers were sent out to the districts.
Naife said that although there had been a few problems with missing registers, they had all been solved within the district.
The MDM has complained that in some cases polling station staff refused to allow MDM monitors to make complaints. In cases where this occurred, the staff were committing a crime, said Naife.
During the training sessions for the staff, they were told that they had to write down all complaints from party monitors, even if they considered the complaint to be worthless. This instruction is also clearly written in the polling station manual.
As for the fraud at some polling stations, whereby dishonest members of staff had added blobs of ink or inky fingerprints to ballot papers, to make it look as if the voters concerned had voted for two candidates, Naife said this too was a crime, and if there was sufficient evidence those involved could be prosecuted.
Similarly with polling stations that had reported an impossible turnout of 100 per cent or more. "We will take measures", Naife pledged. "But we must first analyse all these situations case by case".
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