Election Fraud has Become Banal in Mozambique  

By Ernesto Nhanale, Lecturer of Journalism

Maputo (MOZTIMES) – The frequency with which we have witnessed ballot box stuffing with ballot papers marked in advance, voters trying to vote more than once, the swapping of polling station results sheets, the manipulation of laws to favour political actors and even the validation of what is illegal by the Constitutional Council (CC), and the manipulation of public opinion by the publicly owned mass media – all this leads us to believe that fraud should no longer be regarded as a deviation from the norm, subject to social disapproval and which can be punished. Fraud has become a recurrent strategic resource used by certain political parties to win votes.  

Since the 1999 elections up until 2024, election fraud has been talked about, and detected, and proof has been shown, but without any effective action being taken to reverse the situation. When we gaze  tolerantly on election fraud, this ensures that from one election to the next, fraud takes on ever newer shapes. In the 2023 and 2024 elections, fraud took on alarming and innovative forms. It became normal that in the news items on the days following the vote (outside of those produced by the public sector media) the keynotes should be episodes of fraud and manpulation of election results.

In addition to the habitual types of fraud, during the 2023-2024 election cycle, we witnessed two new ways of adulterating the election results: importing voters and bribes in exchange for election results. The importing of voters has been confirmed by the Zimbabwean paper “The Mirror”, which wrote that Zimbabwean citizens voted in the Mozambican general elections of 9 October. During the voter registration period, this fact had already been denounced. As always, the authorities of the two countries (Mozambique and Zimbabwe) maintained a complicit silence in the face of a fact that should have deserved investigation and public explanation.