Zimbabwe opposition wants vote verified

African neighbors urged to intervene

Election authorities said the opposition candidate did not win by enough votes to avoid a runoff. (Associated Press)

JOHANNESBURG - Asserting that their presidential candidate was robbed of victory in long-delayed official election results, leaders of Zimbabwe's opposition party made a last-ditch diplomatic push yesterday to persuade the African Union and a bloc of southern African nations to insist on a verifiable vote count.

Zimbabwe's election authorities declared Friday that the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won 47.9 percent of the vote in the March 29 presidential election, not enough to avoid a runoff with the incumbent, Robert Mugabe, who got 43.2 percent.

Tsvangirai and his party's leaders must now decide whether he will take part in a runoff, despite their contention that election authorities denied them the ability to verify the outcome of an election they believe they won outright. If Tsvangirai boycotts the race, Mugabe will be declared the winner under Zimbabwean law.

At an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations, three weeks ago in Lusaka, Zambia, the group urged Zimbabwe's election authorities to conduct a vote verification process that all political parties would witness.

Its final communique said that the parties "must all sign the authenticity of such verification and counting."

The opposition said Zimbabwe's election authorities disregarded the regional bloc's communique, ending the verification process on Friday and failing to obtain the agreement or signature of the opposition's representative, Chris Mbanga.

Utoile Silaigwana, Zimbabwe's deputy chief election officer, said in an interview yesterday that Zimbabwe's own laws do not require that political parties sign off on election results.

"There is no provision in the law that parties should sign for the result," he said. "Why should we do something illegal?"

Tsvangirai flew to Lusaka yesterday to present his party's formal objections about the vote verification process to Zambia's president, Levy Mwanawasa, who heads the Southern African Development Community, said George Sibotshiwe, a spokesman for Tsvangirai.

Mbanga said yesterday that the opposition and election authorities had only begun to compare their discrepancies in the tallies for the Mashonaland West Province on Friday morning.

For the results of two of the six polling stations examined, he said, the vote counts provided by election authorities were not documented on official forms with the required signatures by the opposition's agents, raising suspicions of tampering.

"What would be the logic of abruptly stopping the exercise if there is nothing to hide?" Mbanga asked.