The Constitutional Council (CC) recently asked the Mais Integridade Consortium, a platform that monitors the electoral process in the country, for copies of the minutes and public notices in its possession, as part of the process of validating the results of the general elections held last October 9.

"It was with great surprise that Mais Integridade received this notification. You are requesting documents that you refused to accept after the local elections held on October 11, 2023," reads the letter from the Consortium signed by its executive director, Edson Cortês, acknowledging receipt of the document.

It should be remembered that after the vote, the Mais Integridade Electoral Observation Platform, made up of seven Mozambican civil society organizations, stated in its preliminary report on the vote and partial and intermediate tabulation that the seventh presidential and legislative elections and the fourth provincial assembly elections on October 9 were neither free, fair nor transparent.

"Once again, as a country, we have held elections that are fraudulent, elections that do not reflect, at least in what we have been observing, the will of the voters," Edson Cortêz, president of the Mais Integridade Electoral Consortium, the electoral observation platform, told the press.

When presenting the data, Edson Cortez said that the finding was the result of a parallel count of the vote that the platform carried out in the provinces of Nampula and Zambézia, the country's two largest constituencies, using 29,900 and 28,500 voters as a sample, respectively, out of just over 17.1 million registered voters across the country.

"Faced with this scenario, it's very difficult for the consortium to come out and say that we've counted based on the calls for tender, because most of the calls for tender have 'hammered' results, to say the least," said the director of the Center for Public Integrity (CIP), an NGO that is part of the Mais Integridade platform.

Reacting to the Constitutional Council's request for copies of the minutes and notices of last October's elections, the consortium recalled that the information it sent and which was rejected by the CC after the municipal elections "presented clear evidence that contrasted with the results announced by the National Electoral Commission (CNE), showing signs of substantial fraud in those elections".

In this sense, Mais Integridade believes that even though it has some notices in its possession, sharing them would not significantly contribute to guaranteeing the truth of the election, since the notices submitted by the CNE "were falsified and do not reflect the results that the more than 2,000 observers from the Consortium witnessed at the time of the vote count".

"Mais Integridade is not intended to be a source of misrepresentation of the electoral truth," the consortium explained, concluding that "in the context of a lack of trust and integrity in the institutions, the late request for information could be used to "legitimize the validation of the fraud of the elections of 9 October last year".

(Photo DR)