Absence of violence does not mean vote was fair or credible

02 August 2013 - 03:33 By The Times Editorial
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The Times Editorial: What is one to make of Zimbabwe's chaotic presidential, parliamentary and local elections on Wednesday?

The vote passed off peacefully, unlike the bloody campaign of 2008, in which the victor, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of a second round of voting after 200 of his supporters were killed.

This time around there was no evidence of the large-scale intimidation of opposition voters by the security services and President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF loyalists.

But the absence of violence does not mean that the elections were free, fair or credible.

According to independent monitors, as many as a million Zimbabweans - most of them in MDC strongholds - were disenfranchised by being illegally turned away from polling stations.

The voters' roll was a shambles - riddled with ''ghost'' voters and containing the names of more than 200 000 people aged 103 or more.

Zimbabwe's hastily declared election - Mugabe unilaterally announced its date only a month beforehand, before key reforms to the security services and state media were in place - was a masterclass on how to guarantee victory for the incumbent.

You don't have to beat people into submission, you don't even have to fiddle the vote-counting - all you need do is ensure that vast numbers of opposition supporters are unable to vote because their names are either not on the voters' roll or they have been assigned to vote at the wrong polling station.

So where to from here? If the preliminary statements of the SADC, and African Union officials, are anything to go by the election will get some sort of qualified thumbs-up.

Zimbabwe's precarious power-sharing government will be put out of its misery, leaving the MDC to try for a fourth time to unseat the man who has ruled the country for 33 years. The only question is whether the West will accept this colossal fiddle and drop its sanctions against Mugabe and his acolytes.

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