“REQUALIFICATION” OF INVALID VOTES THROUGHOUT WEEKEND

Mozambique’s National Elections Commission (CNE) continued throughout the weekend with the gigantic task of reclassifying hundreds of votes which were regarded as invalid during the polling station count immediately following the 15 October general elections.By Sunday, nine of the 11 provincial constituencies had been dealt with, leaving until last the two largest provinces, Nampula and Zambezia. The CNE had brought in staff from its executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (stea), and teams of two members each worked their way conscientiously through mountains of supposedly invalid votes. Each ballot paper was thus seen by at least two people. The teams were chosen so that one was a staff member indicated by the ruling Frelimo Party, and the other by one of the opposition parties.The teams were clearly working to rescue as many of the ballots as possible, giving the voters the benefit of the doubt wherever they could. Watching the “requalification” of supposedly invalid votes from the parliamentary election in Zambezia and Nampula, AIM noted that, quite unlike previous years, the majority of votes sorted by the teams watched were reclassified as valid. In many cases this was because the polling station staff had been too strict, judging a ballot as invalid simply because the “x” or, in the case of illiterate voters, the fingerprint, strayed beyond the borders of the favoured party’s box. Voters using the inkpad rather than the pen provided found it particularly difficult to mark the parliamentary ballot paper because so many minor parties were standing. The names were crowded together, and if a voter put his fingerprint on the box for one party, he might find it difficult to prevent some of the ink from going into the box above or below.The teams adopted a common sense attitude – if most of the fingerprint or cross was in one box, that was the party the voter had chosen. But there were many votes classified as invalid at the polling stations where there could be no doubt – the entire cross or entire fingerprint was neatly placed in one box. AIM saw a string of about 50 perfectly valid votes for the ruling Frelimo party, one after another, which polling station staff had seen fit to reject.There seem two plausible explanations for this. One is deliberate fraud – in the middle of the night, hoping they would not be spotted, staff surreptitiously tossed votes they disapproved of into the pile of invalid votes.Alternatively, tired of doing the job properly, staff just shoved fistfuls of ballots into the heap of invalid votes, without even looking at them, in order to finish more quickly, fully aware that the votes would be rescued in Maputo. The first hypothesis assumes that staff did not know what happens to votes declared invalid, the second that they did.In both cases it is not possible to know which district, let alone which polling station, these votes came from. At this stage, the votes are only dealt with by province.One problem that occurred in both Zambezia and Nampula was the use of felt tipped pens. Since these pens are not included in polling station kits, the voters must have brought them from home. They seem to have taken seriously the rumours that the ballpoint pens at the polling stations were not trustworthy and that, if they used them, their votes might mysteriously disappear.The problem with felt tipped pens is that they put a lot of ink onto the paper, so that, when the paper is folded, ink can be transferred to the other side, making it look as if the voter had tried to vote for two parties. Careless use of the ink pad can have the same effect. Some voters make their feelings very clear indeed – but in ways that invalidate their votes. Thus the voter who bothered to write “Party of bandits! Sons of whores!” in the Renamo box, was just wasting his time. The CNE expects to have the requalification complete by Sunday evening, and the reclassified votes can then be added to the totals of valid votes for all candidates and parties in the 11 provinces.