
Constitucional Council. Foto de Ferhat Momade
Maputo, 6 Nov (AIM) – The Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, has ordered the National Elections Commission (CNE) to explain the discrepancies in the numbers of votes cast in the three elections that were held on 9 October – the presidential, parliamentary and provincial assembly elections.
When it handed over the preliminary results of the elections on 24 October, the CNE admitted that the discrepancies exist, but claimed it did not have time to investigate them thoroughly before the deadline for announcing the results.
This did not satisfy the Constitutional Council. On Tuesday, the council’s chairperson, Lucia Ribeiro, sent a terse letter to the CNE demanding an explanation for the discrepancies within the next 72 hours.
The CNE chairperson, Anglian bishop Carlos Matsinhe, passed Ribeiro’s letter on to the CNE’s executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat STAE).
The three elections were held simultaneously and so every voter received three ballot papers, one for each election. There were three ballot boxes in each polling station, and each box should have contained the same number of votes as the other two.
But in polling station after polling station, the numbers did not add up. More votes were cast for one election than for the other two. How was that possible?
No observer has ever seen voters throw ballot papers away. Each of them puts one ballot paper in each of the boxes.
And the discrepancies are not just a couple of votes here and there, which could be blamed on human error. Instead, the discrepancies in some areas run to thousands or tens of thousands of votes.
For example, in Govuro district, in the southern province of Inhambane, 7,062 more people voted for the provincial assembly than for the president. In Massinga, also in Inhambane, the difference was massive. Apparently, 36,974 more people voted for parliament than for the provincial assembly – a result which ought to have been impossible for elections held simultaneously.
In a few districts, the numbers are honest and there are no discrepancies. Thus in Namacurra district, in Zambezia province, the same number of people (33,421) voted in all three elections, and here was the same number of abstentions (75,504).
This agreement between the votes cast in the three elections should have happened everywhere – but in most districts they did not.
The unexplained discrepancies cast a very serious shadow over the elections, and pose an awkward dilemma for the Constitutional Council, which could discard the data from any polling station where the results do not make mathematical sense.
(AIM)
Pf/ (431)