
Maputo, 18 Nov (AIM) – The Electoral Observation Mission of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (MOE-CPLP) claims that it witnessed incorrect vote counting and evidence of people voting several times during the Mozambican general elections held on 9 October.
According to the MOE-CPLP final report, the irregularities observed “negatively conditioned the transparency and credibility of the process”, which means that the elections took place “in a context of mistrust of the electoral system.”
“In the various polling stations where we were present, there was disparate compliance with the electoral legislation, namely as regards the reading of the sequential number on the ballot paper; the existence of blank ballot papers in excess of the number of voters registered at the table; the counting of discharges recorded in the electoral roll; the reconciliation of the number of discharges in the electoral roll with the number of votes found in the ballot box; the locking of the voters’ list; and the posting of minutes in a visible place in the polling station”, says the note, cited by the Portuguese News Agency, Lusa.
The MOE-CPLP, led by former Portuguese Foreign Minister João Gomes Cravinho, points out that, given the pre-election controversies “the starting point was not favorable for the credibility of the elections.”
Among the pre-election controversies, the CPLP mission lists the challenge that the 2023 local elections triggered, with the Constitutional Council (CC) rectifying the distribution of victories and repeating the ballot in several municipalities and polling stations in relation to the results announced at the time by the National Electoral Commission (CNE).
“The detailed reasoning of the CNE in its initial allocation of electoral results and of the Constitutional Council (CC) in its subsequent decisions, as well as the detailed breakdown of the electoral numbers for each polling station in each municipality, are not fully known, leading to the final results of the municipal elections being shrouded in controversy”, reads the report.
As for the 9 October general elections, the CPLP observers noted “several cases of miscounting of votes, namely: ballot papers folded over and counted as valid, indicating that the same person had voted more than once, and also many dozens of votes with an identical mark, indicating that the marking on the ballot paper had been made by the same person”.
The “excessive delay” in counting the votes and the different procedures used by the polling station chairpersons resulted “in the results not being available many hours after the close of polls, negatively conditioning the perception of transparency and, consequently, the credibility of the process”.
According to the document, “the announcement of the results by the CNE on 24 October was the result of a majority decision by its members and was not made by consensus, which contributes to a feeling of uncertainty about the reliability of the results”.
Acknowledging that it is now up to the Constitutional Council to have ‘the final word’ on the results of the 9 October elections, the CPLP believes “that there will be important work to be done by the Mozambican authorities in partnership with party representatives and civil society, to regain citizens’ confidence in the elections, and in this way gain greater credibility for the results.”
In order to avoid similar cases in future, the CPLP calls on the CNE to be “more technical than political, in order to improve citizens’ confidence in the neutrality of the body.”
(AIM)
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