The National Elections Commission (CNE) violated the law with total impunity. Four examples included party funding, the order of parties on the ballot paper, tabulation, and publication of results.
The CNE distributed $3 mn to political parties, but did not follow the electoral law. Money must be distributed 21 days before the start of the campaign, 30 August last year. But money was only distributed after the campaign began. And the CNE refused repeated requests to detail how money was allocated. In fact the allocation violated the law.
The law (art 38 of law 2/2019) says that “distribution of state funds must take into account the proportion of candidates presented with respect to the seats to be filled”. The implication is that each candidate for parliament should received the same amount of state funds, but the CNE did not do this. At the most extreme, each candidate standing for the single AR seat in Africa received 345,000 MT ($5587), while each candidate for one of the 45 seats in Nampula received only 5,000 MT ($81).
There are three elections – President, national parliament (AR), and provincial assemblies (APs) – and there is 60 million meticais ($972,000) in government money for parties for each election. The obvious decision would be to simply divide 60 mn MT between the 4 presidential candidates, 60 mn MT between the 5232 parliamentary candidates, and 60 mn MT between the 2863 AP candidates.
But the CNE instead decided that for AR and AP elections, money should first be divided between equally between constituencies – for AR there are 13 constituencies (11 provinces plus Africa and Europe) and for AP just 10 constituencies (the provinces except Maputo city which already has an elected municipal assembly). But Nampula has 45 AR seats and Zambézia 41, while Africa and Europe have 1 each, which means a huge variation in the amount of money for each candidate – not proportional as the law specifies. The gainers are the three big parties, Frelimo, Renamo, and MDM, which have members of the CNE, while the small parties lost substantial money.
The CC does the draw for the order of the candidates on the presidential ballot paper, and the CNE does the draw for AR and AP ballot papers. The law (art 188, law 2/2019) says that the CNE will “first sort those parties with candidates in all constituencies and then the rest.” But when the actual draw took place it followed a different procedure, published only later as Deliberação 101/CNE/2019. It said there would be one draw for both AR and AP elections, then said the first four parties on the list would be those with presidential candidates, in the order drawn by the CC, putting Frelimo first on all three ballot papers. Next they drew all remaining parties, whether or not they were standing in all constituencies. This put AMUSI in 4th position even though it was not standing in all constituencies, and 3 parties standing in all constituencies were below some who were not, which clearly violates art 188.
The CNE apparently does not follow the law in doing the national tabulation. The law sets a pyramid: votes are counted at the polling station, those results are collected at district level, and those results are summed at provincial level. The CNE is simply supposed to add together the provincial totals. Instead, it appears that the CNE does its own tabulation from copies of polling stations results sheets (editais), largely ignoring the district and provincial tabulations. Finally, the law (art 121, 123 lei 2/2019) requires that the CNE publish the results for each constituency which for AP means by district. The CNE never published district details for the AP and refused to provide them to this Bulletin, in clear violation of the law. The CC in it final ruling (Acórdão 25) did publish the district results, albeit with errors.