When the Constitutional Council (CC), the highest court in the land, can publicly ratify theelection and then a week later, change the results to give more votes to the ruling party, and then a week after that, change the results again, and do this entirely in secret, it means that Mozambique has a very unusual conception of “transparency”.
The ruling (acórdão) was full of praise for the “transparency” of the election, but the CC twice replaced one version of Acórdão 25 on the website with another, with different vote totals – not only with no announcement, but with no indication in the document that it had been amended.
Similarly, elections commissions and STAEs at all levels believe they have the right to make changes to the results and there is no requirement to keep records of the changes or to make those records public. And substantial and significant changes are made.
Polling station results sheets (editais) are often written after midnight by a very tired polling station staff, and there are inevitably errors – numbers written incorrectly or columns which do not add up correctly. Sometimes the error is obvious and can be corrected, but in other cases that polling station must be excluded. In either case, STAE (not the elections commission) makes the decision in secret, and apparently keeps no record of the change or exclusion. Similarly in past elections polling stations with a turnout of over 100% have been excluded, but this has been done in secret and never been mentioned in any report.
CNE’s directive on city, province and national counting makes clear that all of the basic operations are done by STAE. The directive accepts that there will be corrections of “material or unintelligible errors” but there is no guidance on how and when to correct or change the results, and absolutely no mention of reporting when this is done. In other words, the directive allows STAE and the elections commissions to change the results at will and completely in secret. (“Directiva Sobres a Centralização e Apuramento Distrital ou de Cidade e Provincial …” Deliberação no 107/CNE/2019 de 2 de Outubro) The directive also makes clear the secrecy. The only session open to political party agentes (“mandatários”) and therefore observers and the press is a special session in which STAE formally hands over to the election commission “the summary table of the centralization of results”, Presentation is usually a power point of the tables.
Political parties, observers and the media are not provided with the most basic information of how these total were arrived at.
The CC in Acórdão 25 says transparency is guaranteed by the presence of party nominees in the elections commissions and STAEs. But tabulation is done quickly and with no requirement to keep a record of the changes in votes, making it extremely difficult for a small number of party people to keep a watch over the counts.
Electoral laws set out clearly how the count should be done at the polling station, requiring all vote counting to be done immediately after the polls closed and the counting and documentation writing to be completed while the whole polling station team, observers, party delegates and press are still present. Observers noted various violations. Some polling station teams totally improperly left the polling station for dinner, often for several hours, with ballot boxes unguarded. Procedures were not followed in one-third of polling stations observed, the EU said in an 8 November report. Work was not completed during the session and international observers circulated photos of staff completing results sheets (editais) and minutes sitting under trees or riding in the back of lorries.
At district level STAE corrects the editais and adds them together to give a district result. There are few clearly defined procedures and different districts do it differently, and the EU found half of districts observed doing the tabulation incorrectly.
The CNE does not report on its meetings; minutes and copies of decisions are not made available to press and parties. Formal decisions (deliberações and resoluções) are eventually published in the official Boletim da República, with some delay. The CNE and STAE do not make effective use of their website http://www.stae.org.mz/, which was down at the time of writing this report. STAE does its own parallel count based on polling station results sheets (editais) and in the past this was sometimes made public, but in municipal elections in 2018 it showed that results in several municipalities had been changed to take victory away from the opposition. So in 2019 the STAE parallel count was not public.
Despite repeated requests, information on party funding was never made available.
The CNE set up a press centre for the 2019 general elections but it was hardly used because so little information was available.
