'Proving poll rigging allegations an uphill task'

RENEWAL Democrats of Zimbabwe (RDZ) leader Mr Elton Mangoma has said MDC-Alliance president Mr Nelson Chamisa faces an uphill task in proving his election rigging allegations in the absence of a full tally of the crucial V11 forms.

Mr Mangoma was one of the 23 presidential candidates in the just-ended poll. He represented the Coalition for Democrats.

According to Mr Mangoma's Twitter post, Mr Chamisa admitted in his petition that he only had 79 percent of the V11 forms, weakening his chances of succeeding in his Constitutional Court challenge set for next Wednesday. Mr Chamisa is contesting the presidential election results announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) that declared President Mnangagwa the winner.

According to official results by ZEC, President Mnangagwa romped to victory with 50,8 percent of the total poll, while Mr Chamisa trailed with 44,3 percent.

Mr Chamisa claims he was cheated. Mr Mangoma said concessions by Mr Chamisa that he had failed to gather all the V11 forms coupled by failure by his party to deploy agents to some of the polling stations was a huge blow to his petition.

"He admits that he only has 79 percent of the V11 forms which are the critical source documents," he said.

"He also did not have polling agents at some of the polling stations. So, it is important to note that he does not have a full tally of V11 forms to come up with his own totals that can be compared against the zec totals.

"From an audit point of view, that would be the comprehensive check to verify the results. The V11 forms are the key."

According to Mr Mangoma's analysis of the court challenge, Mr Chamisa does not have enough evidence to controvert ZEC's results posted on its website.

"He (Mr Chamisa) then claims that results that were collated in the provinces were updated in real time into the ZEC server," he said.

"He believes that the server shows that he got 2,6m versus 2m for ED. He says he wrote a letter to ZEC requesting access to the servers which letter has still not been responded to. I think the server issue was dealt with before elections and ZEC said they had no obligation to give anyone access to the servers.

"In any case, the only people with passwords to those servers would be perhaps the two highest ranking ZEC officials and maybe the IT expert. Even if this allegation by Chamisa about those figures in the servers were true, by now those with the passwords may be able to alter information.

"So, even if server information is brought to Court it may not necessarily prove this allegation.

"So, if this is the so-called secret weapon, it may end up being self-destructive that is if it ever sees the light of day."

Wrong spellings in the citation of respondents and other procedural errors on the part of the MDC-Alliance also impact negatively on the petition, said Mr Mangoma.

"There are also issues of procedure such as wrong spellings of some names of respondents, serving at the wrong address of respondents, late serving of papers to some respondents and some respondents who say they were not served with the papers," he said.

"So, after taking all the above issues into account, for me, the court application may not be adequate for the court to declare Chamisa the winner or even to change all the candidates' totals.

"In order to do that you can't pick incidences here and there. "You have to do a full audit of the results with all the V11 forms and that process can only be done by a qualified, independent auditor."