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The country’s top election court has prevented itself from producing a credible election result

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Zitamar News, Maputo

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Lúcia Ribeiro, the president of the Constitutional Council, is not used to the limelight, but she has been getting the kind of exposure more associated with a fashionable celebrity recently. While the council has been ploughing through boxes of documents to check the disputed results of October's elections, Ribeiro has been giving interviews and her meetings have been broadcast in live videos, an unfamiliar role for a judge used to working behind closed doors.

The Constitutional Council is undoubtedly feeling under pressure from the whirlwind of protests against election fraud and against ruling party Frelimo, which have shaken the country for nearly two months. The council, whose job it is to confirm the election results, has in the past been accused of being in the pocket of Frelimo, something to which it contributed by ignoring clear evidence of fraud in last year’s local elections. The violence of the protests combined with this perception have put the judges in a dangerous position, as this newsletter recently noted. Hence the council’s desire to carry out a PR campaign to defend its work.

Unfortunately, what Ribeiro’s media appearances have made clear is that the Constitutional Council is not going to succeed in producing a reliable result. The council has chosen only to check the documents recording the process of counting and tabulating votes: the results sheets (editais) and the minutes (actas) from each voting table. What it has not done, as Ribeiro told journalists yesterday, is recount the votes, although the original ballot papers should still exist.

If the council only works from results sheets, and does not check them against ballot papers, it cannot tell if those sheets have been fabricated. In some cases, sheets were filled in correctly and then, to counter an unwanted result, a replacement sheet was created giving victory to Frelimo. In that case, the council may have been able to compare the different versions. But in other cases, the sheets seem to have been doctored right from the start. The opposition party Podemos has only been able to provide sheets for 23% of the vote.

Whether a full recount would change the election result dramatically, for example by giving victory to opposition presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, is impossible to say. But the fact that we do not know means that any “result” the Constitutional Council announces cannot be trusted.

Even this, however, would not deliver a fair result. Regular readers will remember that the fraud in these elections started back in May, when voters were registered. The final numbers showed that almost 900,000 non-existent voters (5% of the total) had been registered, a tactic that has been used in the past to allow extra votes to be cast for Frelimo. Moreover, it would not deal with the problem of stuffing of ballot boxes, or the abuse of so-called “special votes” by unregistered voters.

The only way to deliver a fair election result would be to declare this election null and void and hold fresh elections, under reformed electoral bodies no longer controlled by Frelimo. That may not be affordable or politically viable, in which case the second-best option would be to hold a full recount. But the Constitutional Council does not want to do either.

Why the council has chosen to take such a limited approach to scrutinising the vote is not clear. It will certainly feed suspicion that it never intended to overturn the official results giving victory to Frelimo in all three elections. And thanks to the electoral law passed earlier this year, lower courts are no longer able to recount votes. Only the National Elections Commission and the Constitutional Council have the power to do that.

Meanwhile, the government evidently hopes that it can appease the public by providing an early cash injection ahead of the Christmas holiday (see below). But it will take more than a sprinkling of cash to address the deep public dissatisfaction with Frelimo.