
Presidente do MDM, Lutero Simango, exerce o voto na escola secundaria Josina Machel na Cidade de Maputo, Foto de Santos Vilanculos
Maputo, 25 Oct (AIM) – Lutero Simango, the leader and presidential candidate of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), has called for a forensic audit of the ballot papers or a re-run of presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections held on 9 October because the results announced by the chairperson of the National Elections Commission (CNE), Anglican Bishop Carlos Matsinhe, “do not reflect the will expressed by the people at the polls.”
“We are thinking of two possible ways to make this electoral process more credible. The first way is a forensic audit and the second is to repeat the elections on the basis of correcting the illegalities found”, he said, speaking on Thursday to reporters after the results were announced.
The results announced by CNE give victory to the ruling Frelimo party and its presidential candidate, Daniel Chapo, with around 70 percent of the votes.
Simango believes that forensic audits of the ballot papers from all the polling stations should be verified in their entirety, including the respective minutes and results sheets (“editais”).
“In other words, what is in the polling stations must correspond, in numerical terms, with what is written in the minutes and results sheets. The discrepancy is around 81,000 voters. That’s why we say, with complete certainty, that there was ballot box stuffing”, he said.
According to the CNE data, for the presidential elections the MDM candidate – once the second largest opposition political force – won 223,066 votes, which corresponds to 3.21 per cent of the total valid votes.
For the parliamentary elections, the MDM won only four of the 250 seats available in the Assembly of the Republic (AR), the Mozambican parliament.
According to Simango, based on the results of the parallel count carried out by the MDM, the party should have a total of 23 deputies.
“In Maputo City, we should have won two seats; in Maputo province three; Inhambane one, Sofala five, Manica one; Tete one, Zambézia three, Nampula four, Cabo Delgado two and Niassa one deputy. In view of the irregularities, the election results cannot be accepted because they do not reflect electoral justice”, he said.
A forensic audit should answer the question: where do the extra ballot papers come from?
For in this election, and in previous ones, voters have been caught with ballot papers marked in advance. But how did they obtain them? With all the security measures that the CNE claims to take, how is it that there are ballot papers circulating outside the control of the electoral management bodies?
Another mystery is the discrepancy between the number of ballot papers cast in the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections. At the polling stations, each voter is given three ballot papers, one for each election.
Since no-one has ever reported a voter throwing away ballot papers, in each polling station there should be the same number of votes for each of the three elections (including spoiled votes and blank ballots).
But there aren’t: In Zambia, the official figures state that 81,673 more people voted in the parliamentary election than in the provincial one. Where did those extra ballot papers come from?
(AIM)
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