20091228
allafrica

Maputo — Mozambique's Constitutional Council, the body that validates election results, announced in Maputo on Monday that over 1,000 of the results sheets ("editais") from the 28 October general and provincial elections could not be processed.

In its ruling proclaiming the election results, the Council said that these were editais that contained "insuperable errors", including some that were deliberately fraudulent.

Of the 12,699 presidential editais, 332 (2.6 per cent) could not be processed. For the parliamentary election, 354 editais (2.8 per cent) were omitted. Because there was no provincial election in Maputo city, only 11,908 polling stations produced a provincial assembly results sheet. Of these, 377 (3.2 per cent) were rejected.

The Council noted that some of these editais were "intentionally corrupted", in that they reported more votes than voters, or a number of voters greater than the number of registered voters in the electoral register for that polling station. Other editais gave the wrong number of the polling station, and so were immediately rejected by the computer system set up by the National Elections Commission (CNE).

The Council did not give a breakdown province by province of the corrupted editais - but this type of fraud clearly refers to those polling stations, mostly in Tete and Gaza provinces that reported impossibly high turnouts of 100 per cent, or more than 100 per cent.

AIM discovered in November that the CNE scrapped 51 of the 122 presidential editais from the most corrupted of the districts, Changara, in Tete. The Constitutional Council has thus backed up the CNE's decision - but it has not gone further. Even with the CNE's purge, there were some Changara editais that still reported turnouts of over 100 per cent, and those results have been allowed to stand.

AIM looked at the remaining 71 editais from Changara, and they were clearly all corrupt, though not all the fraudsters were foolish enough to claim turnouts of over 100 per cent. But in an election where the average turnout is 44 per cent, turnouts of 90 per cent, while theoretically possible, are extremely suspicious and should have sparked off a thorough investigation.

The council also noted that "a large number of votes marked validly by the voters were later deliberately tampered with, leading them to be declared invalid". The most common form of vote tampering was for the polling station returning officer, or other member of staff to add an inky fingerprint to the ballot paper, making it look as if the voter had tried to vote for more than one candidate.

The Council noted that people who tampered with votes were committed a criminal offence, but there have so far been no reports of anyone arrested in connection with vote tampering.

Attorney-General Augusto Paulino informed the Council that 245 people had been arrested in connection with 229 electoral offences - but no breakdown was given of the type of offence.

205 of these were minor offences, which should be dealt with summarily, by the courts and only 24 were crimes serious enough to carry a prison sentence of more than two years. The information on these crimes is sparse, but it is reasonable to assume that most of them refer to destruction of election material and street brawling during the election campaign.

There is no breakdown as to which parties the arrested individuals were supporting, and the Council had no information on how many of them have already been tried and sentenced, or acquitted.

This is a far greater number of arrests than in any previous election. The Council believed that failure to punish electoral offences in the past had generated "a feeling of impunity". It applauded efforts by the police, prosecutors and courts "to apply the law, so that acts that violate it do not go unpunished and to consolidate among all citizens the habit of complying with the norms".