by Bayano Valy – SANF 08 No 20
Vote tabulation is a painstaking process that in closely contested constituencies can make or break a particular candidate. Therefore care must be taken by the relevant electoral bodies to avoid making errors through haste that could stoke up disputes.
In the case of Zimbabwe’s harmonised elections on 29 March, there are four polls in one day for presidential, senatorial, national assembly and council elections.
This presents a challenge not only for the voters who are faced with four ballot papers of different colours, but also for the electoral body.
The amendments to the legal framework for elections will enable polling officials to announce results immediately after counting, in the presence of all candidates or their representatives, with the results posted outside each polling station.
This will allow for tabulation of votes by interested parties, and if deliberately or un-deliberately, the party officials get the arithmetic wrong, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) faces the task of announcing official results rapidly to correct perceptions.
Careful tabulation becomes even more important in a situation where political parties and civic organizations are conducting their own vote count, in other words “parallel” vote counting.
Parallel counting is faster because it is unofficial and unverified, and can cause problems if it gives a distorted result.
The parallel counting may add transparency but it is not as meticulous as the official count. That is not necessarily a problem as it is commonly assumed that the margin of error will be a few percentage points.
However, political parties may be tempted to announce their own winnings first, and this can become a problem if the parallel count result is then presented as the real one.
While the results will be posted at each polling station following the count, the official process of tallying and verification is much more complex, and based on building blocks from ward level through national assembly and senate constituencies, to national level.
After counting the ballots and posting results at a polling station, the results of all four elections will be taken to the Ward Collation Centre. The results of all four elections from all polling stations in the ward are to be collated there at ward level.
Postal ballots are counted at ward level, which means that a total added from results at polling stations will be incomplete. However, candidates or their representatives are being encouraged by ZEC to be present throughout the counting process.
Forms that summarize the results of all four elections at ward level are to be posted outside the Ward Collation Centre, and the winner of the Council election for that ward is declared.
Results of all four ballots are then taken to the House of Assembly Collation Centre, where the results from all wards in that constituency are collated, with summation of senate and presidential results.
The winner of that constituency is declared and the results displayed, as well as results of presidential, senate and council elections for that constituency.
All of the results are sent to the Senatorial Constituency Collation Centre, for summation of presidential results from those constituencies and collation of the Senate results. The winner of that Senate seat is declared and copy of results displayed, together with the results of the other three ballots for that Senate constituency.
Finally, the results of the Senate, House of Assembly and Council elections are sent through the Provincial Command Centre to the National Command Centre for public announcement.
Presidential results are sent through the same route to the National Command Centre, where presidential results from all House of Assembly constituencies are collated and the winner of the presidential election is declared and posted, together with all other results.
The deputy chairperson, Commissioner Joyce Kazembe, said that ZEC is well aware that parallel vote tallying and computation at speeds faster than the electoral body is capable of, is likely to take place, but she stressed that only ZEC can announce official results.
In Angola (1992) and Mozambique (1999) parallel count results produced tense moments which, in the former, resulted in one of the parties, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), refusing to accept the official results and returning to the bush.
In Mozambique, where the law provides for political parties to be involved at all levels except the tabulation process, the main opposition party conducted their own parallel vote count with the assistance of western diplomats and they went on revealing results at daily press conferences where they insisted to be winning in six of 11 provinces (each province is one big constituency under the proportional representation system used in Mozambique).
As the figures did the rounds in the media and non-government organisations, the Renamo party proclaimed themselves the winners of the poll before the CNE (Mozambique’s electoral commission) had made even preliminary announcements.
This was compounded by logistics difficulties that caused delays in the official announcement of results by the CNE.
The final tally confirmed the ruling Frelimo party as the overall winner and revealed that the opposition results had been announced selectively.
However, political analysts were able to establish a causal relationship between the parallel count and the subsequent tense political environment that ensued.
In Tanzania, in 2005, parallel counting was not an issue as the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), took their campaign right down to villages and housing clusters, and emerged with 80 percent of the popular vote for their presidential candidate, Jakaya Kikwete, now President and recently elected by African leaders as Chairperson of the African Union.
The 29 March harmonised elections in Zimbabwe, with four polls in one day, is an administrative challenge for the organizers, but ZEC says that all preparation are in place including ballot boxes, trained officials, and ballot papers.
Generators have been supplied to ensure that counting can proceed in areas with no electricity or if electricity is down.
Apart from four presidential candidates, ZEC says there are 779 candidates for the 210 seats in the lower House of Assembly, and 197 aspirants for the 60 elected seats in the upper house, the Senate, from 12 political parties and 116 independents.
ZEC said it would deploy 107,690 polling officers to oversee voting in 11,000 polling stations throughout the country.
Zimbabwe’s electorate is about 5.9 million registered voters out of a population of around 12 million.
