Honest Voting

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, announced on Sunday that the party will pull out of the country’s runoff elections because of violence and arrests targeting his party and its supporters.

CNN reports that the United States and Britain want a special U.N. Security Council meeting to address the situation in Zimbabwe.

According to CNN, Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe’s justice minister, denied the MDC’s allegations of intimidation and said Tsvangirai was dropping out to avoid “a humiliating defeat.”

In the MDC’s official statement on the presidential runoff, Tsvangirai described what he called “an elaborate and decisive plan by Zanu PF to rig the elections through the following measures”:

i. Commandeering the uniformed forces to use the postal ballot and forcing them to vote in front of their superiors.

ii. The prevention of MDC election agents to get to the polling stations through roadblocks and arrests.

iii. The three Mashonaland provinces have been identified as rigging centres where ballots are going to be stuffed.

iv. Villagers are having their national identity cards confiscated denying them their right to vote.

v. There is a plan to record the serial numbers of ballot papers so as to intimidate voters.

vi. The holding of forced pungwes (overnight meetings) where MDC supporters are beaten and forced to undergo “re-education”.

vii. The abuse of traditional leaders.

viii. The use of massive violence as a weapon to influence the ballot.

The Zimbabwean government plans to go ahead with the coming election even without the participation of the MDC.

The Zimbabwean runoff election campaign continues to be troubled, as the major opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) accuses Zimbabwean police and activists of the ruling ZANU-PF party of violent threats and intimidation.

The MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti was arrested today on charges of treason and of premature announcement of election results. Meanwhile, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been arrested three times in just over a week, also for premature announcement of results before the official announcement of results by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, said police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena, according to a Reuters report in the Africa news website The Daily Nation.

Last month, reports AllAfrica, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, said that “there appears to be an increasing pattern of people being targeted for politically motivated assassination. At another, arrests, harassment, intimidation and violence — directed not just at people with political affiliations, but also at members of civil society — are continuing on a daily basis.”

Observers from the southern African regional body Southern African Development Community (SADC) expect that monitoring the upcoming June 27 election will be difficult; monitors from Western countries critical of Mugabe will not be allowed. Tanki Mothae, team leader and director of SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security told a news conference today that this month’s election would be a “D-Day election”. SADC now plans to deploy as many as 400 election observers.

Tomorrow (as I write this), Kenya will hold five by-elections, less than six months after an election fraught with accusations of voter intimidation and bribery, violence, and deaths. Fears of another violence-filled election have unnerved the international community so much that they’ve sent former UN leader Kofi Annan to help mediate a solution. Aweys Yusuf writes for Reuters South Africa that at least 1,300 people died in two months of struggles after Kenya’s December 27th election, and 300,000 people were displaced. (Other sources peg those numbers lower; I’m still trying to get a handle on those sources’ bonafides.)

A Sapa-AFP article says that Kenya’s electoral board was implicated by some in the alleged widespread fraud that took place during the vote counting process in December. Fierce battles between rival political parties have marked recent Kenyan elections.

Two of the by-elections, says the article, will be held in constituencies where the chaos that followed the December general election prevented the results from being announced, raising fears that fresh disputes could erupt there this week. Two of the other elections are being held to replace lawmakers who were recently shot dead, and the fifth will replace Kenneth Marende, who relinquished his seat when he was elected parliament speaker.

As I write these snippets about election fraud in the United States, I try to remember that elections in some other countries may be suffering far greater difficulties.

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has been widely accused of sabotaging, rigging, and outright stealing the country’s recent presidential election. A runoff election is planned, but, according to the Associated Press, no date for the runoff has been scheduled. Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, said yesterday that the runoff election should have been held within 21 days of the day the elections were announced, May 2nd. However, Zimbabwean government officials have said the electoral commission has up to a year to hold the vote.

Tsvangirai says that he won the first round outright and that official figures showing a second round was necessary were fraudulent. Zimbabwe’s ruling political party, ZANU-PF, has started its own runoff campaign, but members of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party say they face intimidation and violence if they even wear an MDC T-shirt. Tsvangirai left Zimbabwe on March 29th, the original election day, out of fear for his safety.

Whatever election rigging may be going on in the United States, it’s sobering to realize that it could be much, much worse.