By Nenenji Mlangeni
LILONGWE-(MaraviPost)-The ongoing presidential election case in the constitutional court has exposed numerous fraud Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) labored itself into after both Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and UTM winesses started testifying.
Both MEC and President Peter Mutharika’s legal team have failed so far to defend themselves against some of the things that have been exposed.
In summary, here are some of the things that have been exposed:
Printing of Electoral Materials
- MEC printed 5,500 sets of electoral material instead of 5,002 as there were 5,002 Polling Centres;
- MEC has failed to explain who printed the extra 498 sets;
- The packing list of electoral materials that MEC provided was doctored. A well-wisher gave the MCP lawyers the authentic packing list;
- Contract between MEC and the supplier of electoral materials in Dubai stipulated 5,002 sets; Voting Process
- Some of the Ballot Materials that were used are fake i.e. not printed in Dubai by the contracted supplier;
- Monitors were denied opportunity to sign tally sheets as required – instead, MEC Presiding Offices signed in some cases;
- Election observers namely MESN, NICE and CCJP signed Tally Sheets which is against the law and sidelined monitors;
- In some cases, the same person could sign for tally sheets for different polling centres which is against the law;
- After Tally Sheets were signed, MEC started using Tipp-Ex® on the signed tally sheets in the absence of the monitors and used the tipp-exed tally sheets to send results to MEC’s Main Tally Centre; Management of Votes
- One MEC officer could enter results in 3 or 4 different constituencies which are geographically far from each other at the same second which is humanly impossible. In some situations, it could be from constituencies in different regions;
- What MEC released was different from what appeared on the Tally Sheets that were “lucky” to have been duly signed by all monitors as required. This is what Bendulo showed the country in court;
- What MEC are calling errors, have one common denominator: they follow a systematic pattern that proves they are not errors but a premeditated grand rigging plan;
- Only 156 Tally Sheets from 5,002 Tally Sheets were processed in accordance with the designed IT system of MEC;
- 4,846 Tally Sheets were processed by a ghost user thereby affecting over 4.8 million votes;
- MEC did not follow their own procedures when managing the votes in their IT system;
- MEC officers used private email addresses to log into the system while their rules stipulate that they must use official email addresses;
- Only 3 MEC officers were involved in processing of votes and they could have several rights instead of having one specified right;
- MEC deleted information in the system and this was deliberate to defeat the ends of justice;
- There are several gaps in the data that is in MEC’s IT System and this shows that there was manual manipulation of votes as the system on its own cannot do that; Announcement of Results
- MEC officers approved results yet they were supposed to be approved by commissioners;
- By the time Jane Ansah approved the results, most of the votes had not been processed;
- Final results in the MEC IT System were processed and finalised a day after Jane Ansah had already announced the results;
- All the above 21 points were done to favour APM.
The case resumes today.
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Can’t wait for the re-run in 2020