Maputo, 5 May (AIM) – The anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), has accused Mozambique’s Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) of inventing 1.2 million ghost voters for the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for 9 October.
According to a CIP statement, STAE has submitted the final list of 17.2 million registered voters to the county’s National Elections Commission (CNE), but 1.2 million of them do not exist.
“Will the CNE approve such a serious offence?”, CIP asks.
CIP points that the National Statistics Institute (INE) has provided the CNE with figures on how many adults of voting age there are in each district this year.
“We compared this with the number of registered voters and found that 89 districts registered 1.2 million more voters than the INE says exist in terms of adults of voting age in those districts. This represents seven per cent of the 16.8 million registered voters in Mozambique. That is 1.2 million voters who simply cannot exist”, reads the note.
According to CIP, there are more registered voters than INE the says exist in almost every province, but the southern province of Gaza again tops the list with 400,000 fraudulent registrations.
“In Gaza, INE data says that 37 percent of all registered voters don’t exist. The number of impossible voters is so high in all the districts of Gaza and in the neighbouring province of Inhambane, that there must have been organized criminal activity”, CIP says.
“And it should be easy to investigate, first by looking for addresses that don’t exist or that have many registered voters in the same house and then by looking for repeat photos”, the statement explains.
In the central provinces of Zambézia, Sofala and Tete, as well as in the northern province of Niassa, and in Maputo city the registration of ghost voters occurred in less than half of the districts, suggesting that it was not organized at provincial level.
“In Maputo city, it was just one district, Nlhamankulu”, CIP notes. “In Tete, two thirds of the false registrations occurred in a single district, Moatize. In Sofala, half of the false registrations occurred in Muanza”.
CIP asks “will the CNE simply rubber stamp the STAE report, or will it order an investigation into this major organized crime?”
(AIM)
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