The National Election Commission (CNE) did not follow the law. The Constitution Council (CC) did not order a recount so there was no comparison with actual ballot papers. Instead the CC spent eight weeks comparing documents to try to decide which ones were fake. And no one considered the million ghost voters - where there were more voters than voting age adults.
It is impossible to know what the actual voters chose. Observers and CIP Eleições showed it was fraudulent from beginning to end. Fake registration, Frelimo control of polling stations staff, organised ballot box stuffing, fraudulent counts at polling station and district levels. So the CC did the obvious thing, as suggested here several weeks ago, and gave Frelimo a landslide but not as big as the CNE tried to do. This bulletin is entirely based on the CC report this afternoon (23 December) with its results: https://bit.ly/Moz-El-CC-fin
The Attorney General's office (Ministério Público) declared "it is clear that the CNE failed to fulfil its responsibilities of guiding, supervising and overseeing the electoral process (...). We therefore reiterate that these situations call for a more in-depth analysis by the legislature of the composition and functioning of the CNE, with a view to transforming it into a professional body in order to guarantee its independence and impartiality."
And the CNE did its tabulation on the basis of a powerpoint rather than the original district minutes and results sheets, as required by law.
The three ballot boxes are side-by-side and every voter gets three ballot papers. No one has ever noticed a voter putting ballot papers in two boxes and not in the third. Yet the differences were huge. The results submitted by the CNE say that in Inhambane 489,267 people voted for parliament and only 415,158 for provincial assembly - a difference of 74,109 which is 15% of the total parliamentary vote. The CC asked the CNE to explain such discrepancies in seven provinces but the CNE could not. The CC in the results document released today said "The decisions taken by the provincial commissions and the general tabulation carried out by the CNE cannot survive in the legal system, as they are tainted with irregularities."
The CC goes on to say that it has broad power to change results, demand recounts, compare documents and even invalidate the elections. It decided "to move towards an intermediate methodological solution, which is the 'rechecking' of the minutes and results sheets of the partial tabulation in order to detect where the discrepancies originated." This included checking official copies of minutes and results sheets held by parties and observers. This, the CC said, showed that the district tabulation was the centre of the problem because that was where data was inflated.
With ballot box stuffing, false registration, and inflation of the vote and the CC adamantly saying the CNE and district elections commissions could not be trusted, how could anyone - even the CC itself - believe that the CC could determine how people voted. And the CC does not tell us how they obtained the new results. And we must "trust" them.
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Comparing CNE and Constitutional Council results
Both the CNE and the Constitutional Council (CC) gave Frelimo a landslide, but the CC reduced the Frelimo share by a small amount.
President
The CC reduces Chapo's votes by almost half a million, but leaves him with two-thirds of the vote. Mondlane comes second with 24%, followed by Momade (7%) and Simango (4%). Turnout is 39.5%, underlining the anti-Frelimo boycott.
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Parliament
The change by the CC is larger, with the CC taking 10% of the vote away from Frelimo and giving it to the three other parties. Podemos with 43 seats, becomes the main opposition party, followed by Renamo (28) and MDM (8). Podemos is strongest in Nampula and Maputo provinces, Renamo in Nampula and Zambézia, and MDM in Nampula and Sofala. As historically happened, the CNE gave Frelimo 100% of Gaza seats, but the CC gave 2 of those seats to Podemos.
Provincial Assembly
Frelimo won the governorships in all provinces, which does appear to have been a target. And there appears to be even more manipulation at provincial assembly level. In nine of ten provinces Frelimo won with between 60 and 67 seats, which is odd and does feel like a target was set by Frelimo central officials.
