More than 93,000 "ghost" voters, who do not exist, had already been registered in Inhambane by 20 April, one week for the end of registration today. This is the number of registered voters more than the number of voting age adults in the province. Meanwhile, internal documents show that either the technical secretariat STAE was making gross numerical errors, or was lying to its own provincial election commission about how well it was running registration.
This year, each parliament seat will correspond to approximately 60,000 voters, so already registered ghosts will mean an extra seat for Inhambane in the AR. This is exactly how Gaza gained extra seats five years ago. And we expect many thousands more ghosts have registered this week in Inhambane, although we cannot see them in the queues.
Meanwhile, internal Inhambane STAE documents showed a very strange error during the first five weeks of registration. Their tables list registration by district, and then a total at the bottom. But closer examination shows that the "Total" is not the sum of the district numbers. For example, the report up to 30 March says a total of 186,119 voters had registered. But adding up the 14 districts gives only 152,694. In effect, STAE was telling its bosses in the election commission that it was working hard and registered 33,425 more people in the first two weeks that it actually did. The exaggeration of actual registration continued until 13 April. For the first time, in the 20 April report, the "total" really is the sum of the district registrations.
The table below shows how we calculated the ghosts. It shows the National Statistics Institute (INE) estimate for 2024 voting age adults, and the numbers registered in 2023 and up to 20 April 2024. In all but two districts, more voters have been registered than there are voting age adults. We call these "ghosts" because we cannot see them. Mozambique has high levels of registration, but it is rare to have more than 95% of adults registering. So we consider registrations about 95% of voting-age-adults to be ghosts. And we calculate there are 93,144 ghosts already registered.
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Massinga shows how it is done
A close look at Massinga shows how Inhambane is following the Gaza model of 2019. It took four weeks to slowly reach 4,752 new voters per week. Then suddenly in the 5th week Massinga registration jumped to 20,942. That is 4 times as many as in the previous week. The 6th week was lower, but still double the 4thweek. Clearly by the end of March, the order went out to register more voters, even if they did not exist. By 20 April Massinga had registered more that all the voting age adults in the district, and still had a week to go.
The photo shows a Massinga registration post, which must have a long queue to register so many voters, but who cannot be seen because the voters are ghosts.
