Maputo — About ten members of voter registration brigades were caught red-handed on Thursday night, in the warehouse of the district branch of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) in Gurue, in the central Mozambican province of Zambezia, where they were clandestinely printing voter cards.
This illicit behaviour was caught on film, and the video has circulated widely on social media. According to the latest issue of the bulletin on the municipal elections published by the anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), the video was filmed by Domingos Baessa, the second deputy director of the Gurue district branch of STAE, who was appointed by the main opposition party, Renamo.
At around 20.00, a Renamo member passed by the STAE warehouse and found the door half-open. He informed Baessa, who went to the warehouse and found a team of STAE brigade members, led by the first deputy chairperson of the District Elections Commission, printing voter cards, in the absence of the STAE deputy directors and department heads.
There was no presence of opposition party monitors or other observers during this nocturnal exercise.
The reason given for printing voter cards in the middle of the night was that the printers at the registration posts had broken down. The brigade members asked the voters to continue registering, telling them that they could pick up their cards the following day. But the supervisors took the computers, containing the voters' data, to the STAE warehouse, and it was there that they printed the voter cards.
On Friday, when they were questioned by the district police commander, and by the STAE district director, the local managers of the electoral administration bodies, and the brigade members, replied that the cards being printed were those of voters who registered during the day. The cards could not be printed during the day, because the printers broke down.
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This story might be true, since there are plenty of reports of printers breaking down at registration posts all over the country. But even if the intentions were entirely innocent, it is still illegal to print cards in the middle of the night, hours after the registration posts have closed (at 16.00).
The fact that the monitors were not present obviously raises suspicions that something fraudulent was going on.
So far the top leadership of STAE and of the National Elections Commission (CNE) have not commented on this incident, which is the most serious irregularity in the voter registration reported so far.
