Record number of spoilt ballots in one-man election
By Tichaona Sibanda
29 June 2008

There was a record number of spoilt ballots in Friday’s one man presidential run-off . Officially ZEC put the number of spoiled ballots at 130 000 but election observers said the actual number was much higher.
The MDC MP for Mbizvo in KweKwe, Settlement Chikwinya, gave an example of one polling station in his constituency, where there were 600 spoilt ballots, and Mugabe received 400 votes.

‘There were so many spoilt ballots in the Midlands region I wouldn’t be surprised if the ZEC fail to mention this. People went to the polling stations to have the red ink on their fingers otherwise they spoiled all their ballots,’ Chikwinya said. African observers also noted that there were an ‘unusually high number of spoilt ballots’ with ‘unpalatable messages’ written on them.

Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan African Parliament (PAP) mission, said his team of around 50 observers concluded that ‘the atmosphere prevailing in the country did not give rise to the conduct of free, fair and credible elections’.

No Western observers were allowed to monitor the poll but teams from the 14-nation SADC bloc and the African Union were granted accreditation. The PAP observer team called for the holding of a new round of polling, dismissing Friday vote as neither free nor fair.

PAP said: ‘Conditions should be put in place for the holding of free, fair and credible elections as soon as possible. The political environment throughout the country was tense, hostile and volatile, characterised by an electoral campaign marred by high levels of intimidation, violence, displacement of people, abductions, and loss of life. Political tolerance in Zimbabwe has deteriorated to the lowest ebb in recent history--to unprecedented levels.’