Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) has rejected requests to have independent ICT auditors to monitor election management systems and conduct manual transmission of election results in the September 2025 General Elections.
The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), United Democratic Front (UDF), Alliance for Democracy (Aford) and UTM Party, wrote MEC to express concerns with the election management system.
Among other things, they asked the electoral body to allow independent ICT auditors to check the MEC system and also have a manual transmission of election results.
But addressing the issue in Lilongwe on Thursday during the National Elections Consultative Forum (Necof), MEC chairperson Annabel Mtalimanja said MEC has no plans to have independent ICT auditors due to security reasons.
She said MEC has to protect the system at all cost, adding that political parties would be the first to blame MEC if the system got corrupted after involving other players.
Said Mtalimanja: “At the moment, the commission has no plans of procuring the services of ICT auditors, either on its own or through the facilitation of the UNDP to audit its processes.
“Political parties will recall that during the demonstration of the functionality of the EMDs [election management devices], one of the sessions was specifically arranged for ICT experts representing political parties. The reason was to give an opportunity to political parties to confirm that all the processes in the elections management system are capable of being verified.
“The commission will continue with this approach and will hold similar engagements with ICT experts from political parties on all other processes in the elections management system.”
On the manual transmission of data that the parties proposed, the MEC chairperson said the during pilot phase, the election management devices successfully transmitted all the data to the commission servers and the servers managed to synchronise all the data received.
She further indicated that MEC will be issuing physical daily statistics for each centre directly to party representatives and that political parties will also be entitled to the end-of-day reports which will be used to verify the voters register at the end of the exercise.
“The same will apply to all other processes including the management of results, the commission will be using the hybrid system of transmission of all electoral data,” said Mtalimanja.
In an interview, DPP secretary general Peter Mukhito said the party will continue engaging MEC to consider having independent ICT auditors.
He said Mukhito: “Our demand is not too much.We need these independent auditors so that there should be a fair game between the players and them as referees.”
On her part, Malawi Congress Party publicity secretary Jessie Kabwila said in the past, elections were tampered with despite having independent auditors.
She wondered why other parties were pressuring MEC to have independent auditors.
