The fraud exceeded our expectations
We have spent the weekend anxiously waiting for people NOT to vote. So different and so bizarre, because for the past eight years we have agonised over low voter turnout. Now we got low voter turnout, and check out the figures ZEC has come up with! Anyone want the job to be the ZEC acturial scientist?: its up for grabs, because you only have to be “smarter than a fifth grader” to qualify.
For us at home, these numbers are little league: we are used to going to the shops and working out more difficult sums paying for a day’s groceries. Try working out how to pay Z$63 billion (we don’t bother with millions any more) when you have at last count 23 different currency notes to choose from!!! The biggest being $50 billion with a special title “agro cheque”. We thought the acronym for “agricultural” would be “agri”, but someone in the exchequer had a sense of humour, so now we have a bank note that reflects the state of mind of the state.
Back to the zec figures, well these are exactly what we expected, so no surprises, but really did we have to be subjected to such blatant and stupid interpretation of voter turnout? I think the best moment we had today was reading this comment from the blog:
“We all knew they were going to fix the figures, but you would think they would at least try to make the figures some what plausible. This just demonstrates how they are mentally completely out of their minds because they can’t even tell how stupid their actions are.”
So, to all you activists who have chased Giesecke & Devrient, keep on at it, it’s a great way to help bring the inevitable collapse of the regime.
Where to from here? Yes, we are all exhausted from the continuous unknown, but we all knew 27/6 would be only a small part of the journey to democracy. We have to sit back and take stock and look at what we CAN do.
The MDC will continue on its path of peaceful negotiation: they stand on the high moral ground against a violent and deceitful enemy, one whose strategic plan is bereft of answers to the ills of our nation.
The African Union meeting tomorrow is the first port of call for any who want to help. Go and stand outside Zimbabwe’s embassies, phone Zimbabwean embassies in your home countries or here in Zimbabwe, lobby your own MP’s, talk to people, write e mails, pass on information. (More on how to take Action here)
June 29th, 2008 21:19
For those interested in using football and the world cup in particular there are several thing going on
a new face book group
http://www.facebook.com/groups/edit.php?gid=13839794710&members=1#/group.php?gid=13839794710
Our Kenyan brother stood by us read this article
http://allafrica.com/stories/200806181159.html
and there is a petition
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/974640253
June 30th, 2008 15:12
In an ideal world election voting should take place on a Direct Recording Electronic system (DRE), or E-voting by computer, by making a choice on a polling booth screen. The votes are then held on a memory card or CD and transported to a centralized location for tabulation, whilst at the same time the machines also broadcast the voting data over a modem to modem line to a central computer as a back-up and for later verification of the results. But the situation in Zimbabwe is, of course as everyone knows, not ideal. So there are paper ballots which the Zanu-PF controlled authorities simply count and rig to their advantage.
However, in the March 29th elections, although they were heavily rigged by Zanu-PF, circumstances prevailed which resulted in them being unsuccessful in giving themselves victory in the party election. In the presidential election, although Morgan Tsvangirai actully received about 54% of the vote, they had to find a way to reduce this in order to announce a falsified run-off, so that Mugabe could end up (as he now has done) being victorious after all. This they achieved after five weeks delay when they released results giving Tsvangirai 47% and Mugabe 43%; a result which would require the desired run-off.
The actual returns of the 29th March elections are, however, still somewhere. They are held under lock and key somewhere by the state. When the MDC, who were also able to monitor the polls, claimed soon afterwards that they had won, they were accused of ‘treason’, but now when Zanu-PF and Mugabe do the same thing in advance of the ZEC official results, that is acceptable and not considered treason.
My question is, if the original actual returns
of the March 29th presidential result (Morgan 54%) is somewhere under lock and key, couldn’t someone get hold of them and verify the true results to the world? Or am I being silly?
June 30th, 2008 17:33
Pure electronic voting is trivially easy to subvert - there must be a physical paper trail to provide backup to any electronic vote. You may click on one option on the screen, but the user - or the election agent - has no way of knowing if that’s what has actually been recorded on the memory card.
So in addition to what True Grit suggests (memory card and electronic transmission), electronic voting booths also need to print a record of the vote and ask the voter to confirm that the printed record matches their vote. These printouts can then be stored for recount purposes.
In truth, though, the only advantage of electronic voting is the speed of the count - you can have a result within minutes of the polls closing. But the real and high risk of tampering with results, to me, means it’s far better to stick with paper voting…