General Elections 96 – 26 January 2020
Frelimo and President Filipe Nyusi swept away the opposition in the 15 October 2019 general elections, matching Armando Guebuza’s 2009 landslide. But there were widespead reports of misconduct.
On a 52% turnout, Nyusi won 73% of the vote with over 50% in all provinces. Frelimo won majorities in all provincial parliaments and in the first ever election of governors, Frelimo won all ten.
Frelimo won 184 seats in parliament (AR, Assembleia da República) which is not enough to
change the constitution before 2023. To amend the constitution less than five years after the previous amendment (12 June 2018) requires a threequarters majority (188 seats) but after that only a two thirds majority (167 seats), so Frelimo will be able to amend the constitution in 2023 and 2024. (Constitution art 301, 303)
But there was heavy criticism of the election. Electoral management bodies were much more partisan than in the past, and their misconduct was much more blatant in than in previous elections. For example, election officials registered over 300,000 more voters than the 2017 population census said there were adults of voting age in Gaza. And in a total violation of the law, election officials refused to give credential to more than 3000 domestic observers who were supposed to carry out the parallel vote tabulation (PVT). Even the Comissão Nacional de Eleições (National Elections Commission, CNE) violated the law.
Secrecy and limitations on observation make it difficult to quantify the fraud, but the most gross misconduct which could be identified from public data inflated Nyusi’s victory by more than half a million votes and took 5 parliament (AR) seats from Renamo. This is detailed on page 13 of this report.
Lack of transparency was a particular problem, with small and large decisions taken in secret and not announced or explained; vote tabulation was largely secret. Without noting that it had done so and without explanation, when the CNE announced its results on 27 October 2019 it excluded 144,918 votes. When the CNE results were confirmed virtually unchanged by the Conselho Constitucional (Constitutional Council, CC) on 23 December the vote exclusion was not mentioned – then, in secret, the CC corrected the mistake for the presidential vote, but not for the parliamentary vote, which it later corrected in a second secret change.
