10 November 2009
Maputo — The Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), the country's third largest political party, has protested at alleged tampering with votes at the polling stations during the general elections of 28 October.
The MDM has listed irregularities province by province, and if the claims are true they indicate that serious crimes were committed by staff at several polling stations.
Thus the MDM filmed, presumably on a mobile phone, apparent vote tampering at a ballot station in a school in the Esturro neighbourhood of Beira. A staff member named Teresinha used ink marks to invalidate 124 votes cast for the MDM leader and presidential candidate Daviz Simango. This fraud works by making it look as if the voters concerned have tried to vote for two candidates.
The MDM says Teresinha only stopped altering votes when an MDM polling station monitor intervened loudly against her.
The MDM accuses the returning officer at a polling station in Mafambisse, in Sofala province, named only as Eufrasia, of slipping extra votes into the ballot box after the polls had closed. The party alleges that when an MDM monitor protested he was beaten up, and the police had to fire in the air to disperse an angry crowd outside the polling station.
In Savane, also in Sofala, the MDM claimed that local secretary for the ruling Frelimo Party voted three times, claiming he was representing people too sick to vote in person.
The MDM also says that in parts of the country its monitors were not given credentials and so could not observe the voting. This was the case throughout the district of Changara, in Tete province. This allegation gains weight from Changara's unsavoury reputation for fraud. In the 2004 elections, dozens of Changara polling stations reported an impossible turnout of 100 per cent or more.
The same thing happened this year, with the result that Changara district boasts a ridiculous turnout of 95 per cent - in an election where the average national turnout is around 42 per cent.
Also in Tete, the MDM says its monitors were illegally thrown out of polling stations in Angonia district. The same thing allegedly happened in Gile, Gurue, Pebane and Maganja da Costa districts, and even in Quelimane city, all in Zambezia province, where the monitors were not allowed to watch the counting of the votes, and were only called back into the polling station to receive their copies of the results sheets.
In some instances polling station staff refused to accept protests from the MDM monitors. In Niassa province, polling station staff supposedly told foreign observers they had received no instructions to accept protests from monitors.
In fact, the polling station manual states explicitly that the staff must receive and write down complaints from the political party monitors. Refusal to do so is a crime and can lead to prosecution.
But some of the long list of MDM complaints are trivial or impossible. Thus the MDM claims that at one polling station in the Zambezia district of Nicoadala, 810 votes were cast for Simango and only 25 for Guebuza. Staff then supposedly changed the results sheet to give Guebuza 212 votes and Simango only 15.
These figures are impossible. Nobody won 810 votes in any Zambezia polling station. The maximum number of voters in any polling station is supposed to be 1,000. The MDM claims that 835 votes were cast for Simango and Guebuza - so even if there were no votes for the third candidate, Afonso Dhlakama of Renamo, and no blank or invalid ballots at this station, the turnout would have been 83.5 per cent. But average Zambezia turnout was a miserable 33 per cent.
212 votes for Guebuza and 15 for Simango sounds entirely credible for a Nicoadala polling station.
The MDM protests that electoral registers in some Cabo Delgado polling stations contained over 1,000 names and were therefore falsified. It is certainly true that occasionally the registers (and not only in Cabo Delgado) go over 1,000 names. AIM has seen results sheets indicating registers with 1,012 or 1,025 names. In such cases a decision was taken that it made more sense to put a few more people on the register, rather than break the register in two and establish a new polling station.
The MDM continually refers to "forged registers", without explaining what this concept means. Is the MDM insinuating that STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) somehow arranged a clandestine, parallel voter registration?
STAE general director Felisberto Naife has categorically denied such allegations as "impossible". The computers used for updating the voters' roll between 15 June and 29 July could not have been used outside of these dates because they had timing devices, and it was not possible to issue new voter cards, or add or subtract names after 29 July.
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