Election officials admit Mugabe result flawed

ZIMBABWE

ELECTION chiefs in Zimbabwe have admitted for the first time that last week’s presidential polls were tainted with massive irregularities affecting the votes of more than half a million people.

The nine-member Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) said that 512,000 people were either turned away or had been ‘‘assisted’’ by officials to cast their vote because they were rendered incapable. A total of 3.4 million people voted in the disputed election.

President-elect Robert Mugabe was awarded almost 62 per cent of the presi- dential ballot and his Zanu (PF) party took 75 per cent of parliamentary seats, according to official results.

His opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, described the election as ‘‘a huge farce’’, claiming that his supporters were prevented from registering to vote and subjected to intimidation.

Western governments, as well as African Union observers and those from neighbouring observers, expressed doubts over the poll.

Despite the political tensions, there has been little of the widespread violence that marred past elections.

A notice published by the ZEC yester- day said that 305,000 would-be voters were turned away from the polls. In Harare, the largest base of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), 64,000 people – 16 per cent of the total number of votes cast – were not allowed to cast their ballot.

Poll monitors have reported widespread manipulation of the roll and said the real number of disenfranchised voters could be much higher.

‘‘What that says is that the voters’ roll is a pile of garbage,’’ said Tony Reeler, senior researcher in Harare’s Research and Advocacy Unit.

Widespread analysis

of

the roll has been impossible because officials have refused to release electronic copies.

An early hard copy, seen by the independent Zimbabwean Election Support Network (ZESN), showed a large number of duplicated names, dead voters and tens of thousands who would be more than 100 years old.

As well as those who could not vote, the ZEC notice said that nearly 207,000 people were ‘‘assisted voters’’ – the blind, illiterate or disabled, who could be accompanied into the polling booth with someone to mark their ballot paper for them.

The opposition claims that this

sys- tem was ripe for fraud because Zimbabwe has a literacy rate of more than 90 per cent. This week, a group of women from the remote northeast said they had been driven from their homes because they defied orders from pro-Mugabe officials to feign blindness and illiteracy.

Observers have noted the high incidence of Zanu (PF) supporters being bussed in to MDC strongholds, and that they were allowed to vote without being on the roll.

The ZESN, which had more than 7000 observers in the field before and during the vote, estimated that 750,000 people had been blocked from registering. Solo- mon Zwana, its chairman, described it as ‘‘a systematic effort to disenfranchise’’ young, urban voters.

‘‘A total of 99.97 per cent of rural voters were registered while only 67.94 per cent of urban voters were registered,’’ Dr Zwana added.

Simba Makoni, the former finance minister who defected from Mr Mugabe’s party in 2008, said: ‘‘We reject the results announced by ZEC as not free, not fair, not credible and not legitimate.

‘‘These results do not reflect the expression of the free will of the people of Zimbabwe.’’