The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s duped Nelson Chamisa’s lawyer by diverting him from V23 forms so he becomes bogged down with V11s, a book by the exiled professor Jonathan Moyo says.
The book will be released tomorrow.
The study says shortly after midnight on August 3, 2018, Zec chairperson, Justice Priscilla Chigumba controversially used unreliable Excel spreadsheets, instead of using the more secure server, to declare (Emmerson) Mnangagwa as the winner of the 2018 presidential election with 2 460 463 votes or 50,8%. Zec said Chamisa got 2 147 436 or 44,3%. It put Mnangagwa’s margin of victory at 313 027 votes — around 38 000 votes over the 50% threshold.
Moyo says Mnangagwa, who initially took over after toppling his predecessor Mugabe, won due to “massive rigging” of the election held concurrently with legislative and municipal polls on July 30 last year.
A summary of the study says there were egregious breaches of the electoral processes and misrepresentations of critical information and data to make Mnangagwa win.
Moyo’s work argues Chamisa lost the petition — that is over and above the use of Excel instead of the server — partly because his defence counsel, led by top lawyer Thabani Mpofu, and the ConCourt got bogged down on V.11 forms at the expense of the relevant V.23Bs as the presidential constituency returns in terms of Section 110 (3)(d) of the Electoral Act. It says that was Zec and its lawyers’ diversion strategy to win the case at all costs.
“In essence, the determination and verification of the result was so fundamentally flawed and fraudulently conducted with respect to Section 110(3)(d) of the Electoral Act and the breach so materially compromised and affected the result of the election that it rendered it a product of electoral fraud and a usurpation of the will of the people of Zimbabwe expressed at the polls on 30 July 2018,” the book says.
The study also explains how the state machinery operated to manipulate the vote, mostly in rural areas where Mnangagwa received the majority of votes.
Drawing parallels with the bloody presidential election run-off on June 17, 2008, in which Mugabe unleashed a brutal military campaign for political survival after losing the first round of polling to the late Morgan Tsvangirai, founding MDC leader, the book says Zanu PF had free reign to rig the elections in 518 rural constituencies where the MDC did not have polling agents.
A series of co-ordinated activities were then taken to rescue the situation: manipulation of the vote, crush the protests and preparing for a bruising court challenge, it says.
“In the rural areas, the surrounding circumstances of the run-up to the 2018 general elections were not different from those that characterised the 2008 run-off election,” the book says.
“The November 2017 coup, and especially the fact that the military had toppled Mugabe and his government, put the fear of God among traditional leaders and their communities across rural Zimbabwe. The fact that the army had deployed 2 000 soldiers and embedded them in all rural areas in the country ahead of the military coup, virtually put these communities under siege in the run-up to the 30 July 2018 (polls), especially because the number of the (soldiers) embedded bloated to 5 000.
“The situation that prevailed in the rural areas ahead of the 2018 general elections was particularly conducive for rigging in unprecedented ways. The embedded soldiers were not only out there in the open as Zanu PF political commissars mobilising votes; but some were also visible on election day at polling stations in the rural areas as polling officers. What made this situation worse is that the MDC-Alliance did not have polling agents in 518 polling stations in rural areas considered to be Zanu PF strongholds.
“These 518 polling stations were used to contaminate and manipulate V.11s as part of the rigging that took place between 31 July 2018 and 2 August 2018. The case of the Zec officers who were found by European Union observers completing V.11s, all by themselves, two days after the election, was rampant in the 518 polling stations at which the MDC-Alliance failed to field election agents.
“The completion of fresh V.11s, which occurred after the authorities realised that Chamisa had won the presidential election by 66% of the vote, with Mnangagwa getting 33%, based on the results that Zec had received through its server in the morning of 31 July 2018 after which it commenced a bogus verification exercise at its National Command Centre with ‘a group of people, in excess of 20, punching in what was identified as V.11 data into an Excel spreadsheet’ for a period of two days.
“Against the backdrop of the evidence that has been presented in this monograph, this culminated in the massive rigging of the result of the 2018 presidential election.” -MORE ON Independent