Maputo — Mozambican election officials are confident that this year there will be no repeat of the scandal in 2004, when over 1,000 polling station results sheets ("editais") went missing.

In the 2004 elections, 699 presidential editais and 731 parliamentary editais were excluded from the final count. This was 5.4 per cent of the presidential and 5.7 per cent of the parliamentary editais. Many of these editais simply disappeared - probably stolen - while being transported from polling stations to district or provincial capitals. In some provinces, this reached truly alarming proportions - 11 per cent of editais from Niassa province, and 20 per cent from Cab Delgado went missing.

Nothing as serious has happened this time. Felisberto Naife, general director of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), told AIM that, as of Monday morning, 97 per cent of the editais had been processed.

From five provinces (Maputo City, Maputo Province, Inhambane, Sofala and Manica) the figure had reached 100 per cent, and from Zambezia, 99 per cent.

The work of computerizing the editais has been done in the provinces. The 11 provincial elections commissions have dispatched to the headquarters of STAE and of the National Elections Commission (CNE) CD-ROMs containing all editais processed in the provinces, plus physical copies of any editais that could not be processed.

In most cases, this is due to mathematical mistakes made by polling station staff. For example, if the numbers of votes for the various candidates plus any blank or invalid votes do not add up to the number of votes in the ballot box, the computer will not accept the edital. STAE will attempt to rescue as many of these editais as possible.

Meanwhile, the CNE completed, at about 01.00 on Monday morning, the "requalification" of the hundreds of thousands of votes declared invalid at the polling stations.

The CNE, assisted by members of the Maputo city and province elections commissions, had to look at every one of these ballots and decide whether the voter had in fact expressed a choice.

In this election, as in previous ones, many of the polling station staff took a strict line, rejecting as invalid votes where the voter had used a mark other than a cross or a fingerprint, or where the mark strayed outside the candidate's box.

But the great majority of invalid votes are indeed invalid - ballots where the voter has put a cross between two or more names, or where the cross is in between two candidates, or where insults, slogans or signatures have been written.

STAE admits that a minority of the invalid votes were deliberately invalidated by dishonest polling station staff who added an inky fingerprint to make it look as if the voter had tried to vote for two candidates.

Naife said that in these cases a crime has been committed, and the electoral bodies need evidence in order to prosecute those responsible.

The CNE will now add those "requalified" votes to the editais that came from the provinces to give the final result. There are not enough "requalified" votes to make any difference to the landslide victory by incumbent president Armando Guebuza in the presidential elections.

But it is conceivable that the "requalified" votes in the parliamentary election could change the distribution of parliamentary seats in one or two provinces.