District courts reject six Renamo election appeals – AIM report

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District courts reject six Renamo election appeals – AIM report

7:11 CAT | 22 Oct 2018

The CNE must issue results by Thursday.

District courts have rejected all six appeals made by the main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, against the “intermediate count” of the results from the 10 October municipal elections.

In some cases, the Renamo appeals were thrown out because they were delivered beyond the legal deadline, as happened in the country’s second largest city, Matola.

The law on municipal elections says that appeals must be submitted to the court within 48 hours of the relevant elections commission publicly posting the results. Where that deadline falls on a Sunday, it is extended to the following Monday.

The Matola elections commission says it posted the results on its building on Friday 12 October, but Renamo claims it only knew about them when they were declared at a public ceremony the following day by commission chairperson Carlos Come.

But in either case, Renamo had until Monday 14 October to deliver its appeal. The Renamo mayoral candidate, Antonio Muchanga, claims that the appeal was given to the court on 14 October, but the court says it only received it on 16 October.

This meant the appeal was rejected outright, without any inspection of Renamo’s claims. So there is still no answer to the question of how the same election could give rise to three different results sheets, all apparently signed by Come. Two of these sheets must be false.

The first two sheets are almost identical – except for exactly 4,000 votes transferred either from the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) to Frelimo, or from Frelimo to the MDM. Those 4,000 votes are enough to make the difference between a Frelimo and a Renamo victory. So which was the original sheet, and who doctored it?

The elections commission, however, treated both as fakes, and produced an entirely different, third results sheets, with 23,000 fewer votes, and giving Frelimo victory by 137,875 (48.05 per cent) to Renamo’s 135,678 (47.28 per cent).

All parties to this dispute should, in principle, have copies of the results at each of the 706 Matola polling stations. Posting them on a website would allow the public to see who is right.

Only one other major city, Tete, is in dispute. Here Renamo asked the city court to order a recount, but the appeal was turned down on the grounds that the illegalities alleged by Renamo would not “significantly influence the election result”.

Renamo said the “intermediate account” announced by the Tete elections commission has around 4,000 more valid votes than the sum of the votes from all the polling stations. The court agreed with Renamo’s arithmetic, but said it made no difference to the final result.

While it is true that the scale of the illegality alleged by Renamo does not call the Frelimo victory into question, 4,000 votes is more than enough to alter the distribution of seats in the municipal assembly. Furthermore, the citizens of Tete are certainly entitled to have their votes counted correctly.

In the mining town of Moatize, in Tete province, flagrant irregularities were reported. There were two counts in Moatize. In the first, Renamo won with 11,169 votes to 9,856 for Frelimo. There is an independent check on this count. Journalist Aparicio Jose de Nascimento, editor of the weekly paper “Malacha”, published in Moatize, collected all the information from the results sheets of the 49 Moatize polling stations and published it.

The Moatize polling station results, as given by “Malacha” showed Renamo winning 11,166 votes to 9.789 for Frelimo – almost exactly the same as in the first district count.

But Frelimo demanded a recount. This was done without the presence of monitors from the opposition parties, and it gave Frelimo 9,839 votes and Renamo 9,742.

Since both Renamo and the MDM opposed a recount, it should not have happened. The election materials were locked in a warehouse, to which all three major parties have keys. Throughout the country, the warehouses used by STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) can only be opened if all those with keys consent. But in Moatize, STAE and Frelimo are accused of breaking into the warehouse to obtain the materials for the second count.

The Renamo appeal to the Moatize district court was rejected because it did not meet the 48 hour deadline, and did not take its case to the district elections commission. Renamo retorts that it could not do so because the second count was held without its knowledge.

In Marromeu, in Sofala province, Renamo lost its appeal, again because it missed the deadline. The court recognised that there had been “irregularities” but refused to consider them because the Renamo appeal was late.

The key accusation was that the head of operations of the local STAE branch and the police took all the voting materials from 10 polling stations and counted them in secret, without the presence of anyone from opposition parties. At the 29 polling stations where the count was completed in public, Renamo was winning by 7,406 votes against 4,457 for Frelimo. But the final results sheets for the full 39 polling stations (including the 10 counted in secret) gave Frelimo victory with 8,330 (47%) against 7,810 for Renamo (44%).

This was one of the cases cited by the coordinator of the Renamo Political Commission, Ossufo Momade, when he threatened to end Renamo’s talks with the government unless the electoral irregularities were corrected.

In the last two cases, Alto Molocue in Zambezia and Monapo in Nampula province, the partial count done by STAE, and available by 12 October on the STAE website, showed clear Renamo victories.

STAE’s partial counts, while unofficial, are generally regarded as reliable. In Monapo, with 62 of the 63 polling stations processed, STAE said Renamo had 9,136 votes to 8,480 for Frelimo. But the results released by the district commission, based on all 63 polling stations, gave Frelimo 9,579 against 9,363 for Renamo. So the 63rd polling station gave Frelimo 1,099 votes, which is impossible because the maximum number of people registered at any polling station is 800.

The Monapo court rejected the Renamo appeal, saying that the party had not appealed first to the district commission.

In Alto Molocue, there was a complete parallel count done by observers from EISA (Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa), which gave Renamo over 50 per cent of the votes. But the results from the district commission gave Frelimo a narrow victory by 113 votes.

The Alto Molocue court claims that Renamo did not approach the district commission – Renamo says it did, but the Commission did not respond. The court also said Renamo did not present a copy of the district results sheet it was protesting against.

Renamo intends to appeal against these court decisions to the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.

Meanwhile, the National Elections Commission (CNE) is poring over the results it has received from the 53 municipalities. The CNE must issue results by Thursday. Even these are not definitive, since they can be appealed to the Constitutional Council.

The Constitutional Council will finally validate and proclaim the elections. In case of flagrant irregularities, the Council can insist on new elections, as happened in the 2013 municipal elections in the case of Gurue.

Source: AIM