In another worrying development, we’ve heard from a Kubatana member in the legal profession that there are plans to reopen ballot boxes in Mutare West, Chimanimani West, and possibly other constituencies as well on Friday 11 April. This is ostensibly in connection with recounts for these constituencies. Apparently the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has notified the winning Members of the House of Assembly of this plan, but has not informed local observers and others with a right to witness this reopening of the ballot boxes – and the recounting of the ballot papers inside them.

However, Section 67A of the Electoral Act allows a recount only at ZEC’s own initiative, or if a complaint is made by a losing candidate or party within 48 hours. There has been no credible indication that such a complaint has been made. And ZEC has not said why it wants to reopen boxes, or what boxes it intends to open. In either case there must be reasonable grounds to believe there was a miscount. The arrests of isolated officials do not justify a recount, as any error or fraud here would have needed to have a lot of people being complicit in it, including police and party agents.

As our subscriber pointed out:

The polling process had precautions against fraud during counting and adding, with vote counting done by 11 officials in the presence of party agents, police and observers, and each result then being signed and posted at the polling station. Any fraud at either stage would have required the complicity of numerous people including the police. Every polling station record was made with 6 signed copies & under such supervision that no-one could have hoped to commit a fraud in counting or collating undetected. No complaints were heard from ZANU-Pf during this process. Various observers praised the process. ZEC delayed its own announcements confirming constituency results for days, saying it was checking all the results before doing so. When it announced them, ZANU-PF and state media still voiced no criticism.

In other words, if these recounts are occurring, is there any reasonable suspicion that votes were stolen from Zanu PF? Given the number of observers present at most polling stations, and the transparency of the process of transferring polling station level counts to constituency level tabulation forms, this seems highly unlikely.

With so public a process, there surely can be no reasonable suspicion that Robert Mugabe has been robbed by anyone. Why now open the ballot boxes?

Read more on this issue here

This entry was posted on April 10th, 2008 at 8:52 pm by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.