Looking at the total votes cast for the House of Assembly, you may be asking how the initial predictions of an MDC landslide turned into a neck-and-neck contest, with Zanu-PF actually showing a majority of the total votes cast (or you could be wishing I’d get back to my usual one post a month, and stop clogging up your Friends list - in which case don’t worry, it’ll be over soon). There are a couple of possible reasons for this, so let’s take a look at them.

1) Re-allocation of Votes
Zimbabwe Today details the mechanics of this in this article - the main effect of this tactic is to keep the allocation of parliamentary seats the same, giving the opposition little cause for complaint, while inflating the Zanu-PF vote to make it less of a surprise when Tsvangirai fails to reach the 50% target in the Presidential vote. If you look at the figures for what would have been my constituency if I was still in Zim, Mount Pleasant, you can see how that would look, if it was being done:

The PVT figures are the “scores on the doors”, the ZEC figures are the official numbers from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. Compare the two, and you’ll see that the numbers for MDC/Tsvangirai are deflated, with a corresponding increase across the other candidates. That could be vote re-allocation, or it could be clerical error by either ZEC or the people collecting the PVT figures - at this stage, there’s no way to tell, but you can bet the opposition will be looking for evidence of the former.

2) Unusually-High Turnout
Rural areas are notoriously hard to police - election observers tend to stay in the urban areas and constituencies around them and never get out to the sticks. Same applies to party agents - they can’t get to every constituency, every polling station, so it makes it easier to indulge in some good old-fanshioned ballot stuffing. An indicator for this would be an unusually-high turnout, and/or a very large winning margin for one party. With there being a pattern of this happening in Zanu-PF wins, especially in the rural Mashonaland districts, there’s concern in some corners that this has been happening.

Regarding the generally “low” turnout in the election - usually around the mid-30% range - bear in mind that, by some estimates, as many as half the names on the voter’s roll are people who are either dead or who have left the country.

3) General Skullduggery
Sokwanele has an interactive map showing reported cases of what they call “actions against the SADC norms”. SADC is the Southern African Development Community, who have a document, the Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections, that member states including Zim should follow - the map records cases that break those guidelines. It’s a lot more sparseley populated than in previous elections, but there are still some pretty nasty incidents listed.

Also in this category would be cases of ballot boxes not being properly protected after polling, or simply going missing, which have been reported in some constituencies.

So even though the official results match the PVT results as far as House of Assembly seats are concerned, there’s still been some scope for manipulation, although no-one’s making much of it at the moment. That may change after the Presidential results are finally announced, though.

As for the current state of play… No further results announced since the 10 Senate seats that came out last night. MDC/Tsvangirai have begun court action in Harare to force the release of the Presidential results, but as the electoral laws only require results to be announced within 6 days of polling closing (that would be 9pm Zim time tonight), they’re unlikely to get anywhere until that deadline passes. Electoral law also states the order in which the results should be announced, incidentally, and Senate must be announced before Presidential - which explains why ZEC are able to waste time on a set of results that no-one’s really interested in.

There don’t appear to have been any more raids since the two reported last night - they were possibly an attempt to provoke protests by MDC supporters & gain an excuse for a security crackdown, but if so no-one’s rising to the bait. The ever-eloquent Hope at This is Zimbabwe talks of the fears that began rising when that news broke (their permalinks seem to be borked at the moment - if that link doesn’t work, try this, and page down to the article “…and then there are the lows”). Moses Moyo at Zimbabwe Today has been hearing from his sources about a flurry of activity amongst Zanu-PF officials, and expects that things will finally be resolved today:

This overall need to remove evidence of past misdeeds is one reason why the government has delayed the announcement of the election results for so long. Today all that should finally come to an end.

Zimbabwe Situation have been doing their usual trawling of news sources, and have captured a number of pieces that are worth reading. If reports are accurate - far from guaranteed, it seems - then Mugabe and Zanu-PF should be meeting about now to decide how to proceed. Expect events to move quickly once that meeting is over.