3,910,744 registered to vote in 53 Mozambican municipalities – STAE issues preliminary results

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3,910,744 registered to vote in 53 Mozambican municipalities – STAE issues preliminary results

7:29 CAT | 24 May 2018

Picture: DW

Mozambique’s Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) registered over 90 per cent of the potential electorate in the country’s 53 municipalities in the voter registration that ran from 19 March to 17 May.

According to the preliminary results from the registration, issued by STAE on Thursday, 3,910,744 voters registered out of an estimated potential electorate of 4,328,818, or 90.34 per cent.

This figure is much lower than in previous STAE announcements. That is because the registration took place in all districts which contain municipalities, which gave a figure for the estimated electorate of 7,599,200.

However, the municipal elections scheduled for 10 October will only take place in the municipal areas, and so the latest STAE data omit those parts of districts which are not in municipalities.

Some of the municipalities greatly exceeded their target figures. Thus the six municipalities in the southern province of Gaza, taken together, registered 130.6 per cent of the electorate that the National Statistics Institute (INE) estimated, based on the population census of August 2017.

Within Gaza, the town of Mandlakazi registered an astonishing 363.6 per cent of its target. The STAE target for Mandlakazi was only 5,790, making it the smallest municipality in the country. The number of voters who registered was 21,056.

But there is something seriously wrong about the initial Mandlakazi estimate, since at the last local elections, in 2013, the total number of registered voters was 10,841. The Mandlakazi electorate cannot have shrunk by almost 50 per cent in five years.

There is a similar problem, albeit not so acute, in the Bilene Beach municipality, also in Gaza. The target figure was 5,861, and 8,240 voters were registered, a success rate of 140.6 per cent. But in 2013, the registered electorate in Bilene was 5,941. There seems no good reason why the population of Bilene, a busy tourist resort, would have declined in the past five years.

Other provinces that exceeded their targets were in the centre of the country – Tete (118.04 per cent), Manica (107.57 per cent) and Sofala (104.98 per cent). All four municipalities in Tete beat their targets, and none more so that Ulongue, with 227.58 per cent (registering 21,509 people, when the target was 9,451). But in 2013, the registered electorate in Ulongue was 19,224. So this also seems to be a case where the initial target was a gross underestimate of the number of people of voting age in the municipality.

At the other end of the scale, the province with the worst registration figure was Maputo City. Only 616,082 voters registered out of a target of 796,965 – or 77.3 per cent. Within Maputo, the lowest registration rate (67.53 per cent) came from the Kampfumo urban district, right in the heart of the city, which is the richest and most literate few square kilometres in the country.

Contacted by AIM, STAE spokesperson Claudio Langa said that the estimates for the potential electorate in each of the municipalities were provided by INE. STAE could thus not explain cases such as Mandlakazi, where the target figure was much lower than the 2013 registered electorate.

Langa said these figures are still only preliminary because STAE must now centralise all the data from the provinces on the same computerised data base, and check them for any mistakes or for people who may have registered more than once. The data are then sent to the National Elections Commission (CNE), and only after the CNE has validated them are they considered definitive.

Source: AIM