Africa-Press – Mozambique. Polling station personnel who were involved in illegal acts in the October 11 elections will be disqualified from officiating in the repeat vote scheduled for Sunday, which will cost almost €600,000, an official source announced yesterday .
“We are currently recruiting, and this does not include those Members of the Polling Stations (MMVS) who were directly involved in the illegal acts that occurred on voting day. (…) Those who were involved in these issues will certainly be removed, they will not be involved in this [new] process,” Paulo Cuinica, spokesperson for the National Elections Commission (CNE) of Mozambique, told a press conference in Maputo.
According to Cuinica, a process is currently underway to “ascertain responsibility” for the illegal acts that occurred on voting day in Mozambique’s sixth local elections, a vote strongly contested by the opposition, who denounce it as an alleged “mega-fraud”.
In total, the CNE plans to recruit 525 polling station officials for Sunday. Three hundred will be chosen by public competition, and the remaining 225 nominated by political parties.
The repetition of polling will cost 41 million meticais (€595,000), Cuinica said. The new ballot covers 75 polling stations, 18 in Nacala Porto (Nampula province), three in Milange, 13 in Gurúè (Zambézia) and all 41 tables in Marromeu (Sofala).
Civic education campaign underway
“A civic education campaign is underway to raise awareness among voters registered at the polling stations in question so that on the 10th (Sunday) they can present themselves to exercise their right to vote, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.,” the CNE spokesperson said.
The Council of Ministers of Mozambique last week approved December 10th – proposed by the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE) – as the date for the repetition of local elections in the tables of the four municipalities in which the process was not validated by the Constitutional Council (CC).
The Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo, the largest opposition party) came forward last week with an appeal asking for the suspension of the repeat of this election in those municipalities.
Current legislation establishes that, when the election of one or more polling stations is declared null, “the corresponding electoral acts are [to be] repeated before the second Sunday following the decision of the Constitutional Council”.
The Mozambican Constitutional Council proclaimed, on 24 November, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) as the winner of the municipal elections on 11 October in 56 municipalities, against the previous 64 announced by the CNE, with Renamo winning four, and he ordered repeat elections in four others.
According to the ruling, approved unanimously, read by the president of the CC, judge advisor Lúcia Ribeiro, Frelimo maintained its victory in the country’s two main cities, Maputo and Matola, in which Renamo claimed to be the winner, despite cutting around 60 thousand votes the total allocated to the party in power.
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