Malawi alongside Uganda have been cited as countries with more shocking manipulation of election results at the polling station level than in the national tally.
The finding is contained in a report ‘The playbook for African democrats’ published by The Brenthurst Foundation whose authors include Professor Nick Cheeseman, Uganda’s Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, Tendai Biti, Greg Mills and Ray Hartley.
The authors argue that in Malawi and Uganda, elections have often been manipulated with ballots added to the tally of the president and correction fluid used to ‘remove’ votes for opposition candidates.
Reads the report in part: “A number of cases of multiple voting and underage voting have also been recorded over the past decade, as well as voting by citizens from neighbouring countries.
“The use of digital verification software to ensure that voters are on the electoral register and that they only vote once can help with this.”
But the authors have cautioned that technology is no panacea because there are many examples in which such equipment has ‘gone downʼ at crucial moments in elections, during which it often transpires that large numbers of votes were cast for the ruling party.
The writers have since proposed several measures to deal with any fraudulent activities, including creation of a parallel tally centre to contrast with the official national level results presented by the electoral commission.
Further reads the report: “Mobile phone Apps are important aides, but only if opposition parties have agents and representatives at every level of the vote counting and tallying process.
“Defeating voter fraud is, therefore, just as much about forming effective party structures and recruiting party activists today as it was before the advent of digital technology.”
Other measures include use of WhatsApp to feed results and copies of results forms into a central system, but also providing focused, credible and evidenced updates of the parallel tally and evidence of electoral fraud to international donors and observers.
Reacting to the report yesterday, People’s Party (PP) spokesperson Ackson Kalaile Banda said Malawi has had some serious challenges in handling elections citing the 2019 Tripartite Elections which were marred by serious irregularities.
He said: “Not only that, we in PP still believe that the 2014 election was rigged. Our party won but there was serious manipulation of results that even led then Malawi Electoral Commission chairperson [the late Maxon Mbendera] to shed tears when announcing the results.
“We have put in place some mechanisms like identifying trustworthy people that can safeguard the interests of the majority. Our monitors will be trained on how to handle any issue related to elections at the tally centre.”
In a separate interview, political pundit Wonderful Mkhutche said the malfunction during the 2019 pollsrevealed to the world that Malawi’s elections are mired by manipulation.
“Political party monitors have an important role to play. Therefore, parties must fully utilise them through effective communication to look into any manipulation and report to the authorities,” he said.
Malawians head to the polls on September 16 this year to elect a President, 229 members of Parliament and 509 ward councillors.
