The Numbers Do Not Add Up: Zambia Has A Serious Election Problem

By Brian Matambo, Media Director, PF Pamodzi Alliance There is now a serious problem with the results of Zambia’s 13 August election, and it does not require complicated mathematics to understand. Let me use myself as an example. On election day, I went to vote at Kabulonga Boys.…

By Brian Matambo, Media Director, PF Pamodzi Alliance

There is now a serious problem with the results of Zambia’s 13 August election, and it does not require complicated mathematics to understand. Let me use myself as an example.

On election day, I went to vote at Kabulonga Boys. I joined the queue, waited my turn, and presented my NRC and voter’s card to the polling assistant. She called out my name, my NRC number and my voter’s card number, checked them against the voters’ register, and confirmed them.

I received four ballot papers: one for President, one for Member of Parliament, one for Mayor, and one for Councillor. I went into the booth, marked an X against my preferred candidate in each of the four elections, and deposited each ballot into its corresponding box before leaving the polling station.

That is how millions of Zambians voted. So here is the question: how can there be dramatically more presidential votes than parliamentary votes from people who went through the same process at the same time?

Small differences are normal. Someone may decide not to vote for an MP. A ballot may be spoiled. There will always be exceptions. But this is not a story about a few ballots.

An analysis published by The Africa Report found large differences between presidential and parliamentary turnout in a number of constituencies. In just 16 constituencies examined, the gap reportedly exceeded 170,000 votes.

In Solwezi North, the difference between presidential and parliamentary turnout is reported at more than 46 percentage points. That question needs an answer.

The analysis also identified at least 27 constituencies where presidential turnout exceeded 80 percent, against a national registered-voter-weighted turnout of approximately 57 percent. Nine of those constituencies are in North-Western Province, eight in Western Province, six in Southern Province, three in rural Copperbelt, and one in Central Province. The analysis found none in Eastern, Luapula, Muchinga or Northern provinces, the areas where the opposition performed strongly.

This is where the problem becomes more serious. If people entered a polling station, were verified against the same voters’ register, and participated in elections held at the same time, the ballot papers should reconcile.

If the presidential ballot box contains substantially more votes than the parliamentary race, somebody has to explain where that difference came from. We cannot simply announce results and move on. Where did those presidential votes come from? What happened to the corresponding parliamentary ballots?

These are not opposition questions. They are mathematical questions, and mathematics does not belong to UPND, NRPUP, Tonse Pamodzi or anybody else. The numbers either reconcile or they do not.

The Africa Report estimates that the suspicious difference between presidential and parliamentary turnout could represent somewhere between 350,000 and 550,000 votes nationally, though the publication itself describes this estimate as unverified.

Even that figure would not, on its own, wipe out the approximately 1.1 million-vote difference in the presidential result announced by ECZ. But if this happened in a UPND stronghold, it is reasonable to ask whether votes for Brian Mundubile were reduced or tampered with elsewhere in NRPUP strongholds.

This is only one method of testing the integrity of the election. It does not tell us whether there were other irregularities. It does not resolve allegations about monitors being removed from polling stations. It does not answer questions about results forms. It does not explain what happened during the suspension of counting. And it does not resolve the wider concerns surrounding the electoral environment, including allegations of the army being used to intimidate the public.

So before anybody tells Zambians to accept these results and move on, let us first reconcile the numbers. Bring out the polling-station results. Bring out the GEN 20 forms. Bring out the ballot-paper accounts. Bring out the voters’ registers. Then let us compare the presidential vote against the parliamentary vote, polling station by polling station, constituency by constituency.

This should not frighten anybody who believes the election was clean. I know what happened when I voted at Kabulonga Boys, because I was there. I was verified once, I received my ballots, I voted, and I deposited them into their respective boxes before leaving.

Multiply my experience by millions of Zambians, and the discrepancies become difficult to ignore. If the numbers reconcile, let the evidence show it.

But if they do not, and if hundreds of thousands of presidential votes cannot be satisfactorily accounted for against the other elections conducted at the same time, then Zambia has a bigger problem than a disputed result. We have a compromised election.

If these discrepancies are confirmed, the demand for a fresh presidential election will not simply be a political demand. It will be the logical consequence of numbers that do not add up.