Tag Archives: electoral fraud

Zambia

Lungu wins narrow victory in Zambia as opposition cries foul

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While Edgar Lungu has won a narrow victory for reelection, he shouldn't be celebrating just yet. (Facebook)
While Edgar Lungu has won a narrow victory for reelection, he shouldn’t be celebrating just yet. (Facebook)

Everyone in Zambia always expected that its August 11 presidential election would be close.zambia

But the circumstances of Edgar Lungu’s narrow victory, officially pronounced on Monday by election officials, do not bode well. By a margin of around 13,000 votes, Lungu edged the 50% threshold required to avoid a runoff with his chief opponent, Hakainde Hichilema, a five-time presidential contender and the leader of the opposition.

The result leaves the country divided sharply on political, regional and ethnic lines and subject to weeks or even months of additional political uncertainty.

Hichilema has demanded a recount and is challenging the result in court. He has good reason, starting with the four-day lag between election day and the final tabulation of results. No results, as of Wednesday, were available for the constitutional referendum or the parliamentary elections that also took place August 11 to choose all 156 members of the National Assembly. A delay in counting votes from the capital, Lusaka, has cast additional suspicion on the possibility that the Lungu government might have won the election through fraud. Even the European Union’s observers have expressed their skepticism about the fairness of the voting.

It hasn’t helped help that Lungu leaned on state media significantly throughout the campaign, and that his government went out of its way to shut down The Post, one of the leading opposition newspapers in the country earlier this year. Nor did it help that Zambia, which has seen several peaceful transfers of power from one party to a different party, endured a greater amount of political violence than in past election years (though still quite mild by, say, Kenya 2007 standards).

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RELATED: Hichilema hopes to win rematch in Zambia’s presidential race

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Hichilema, meanwhile, expected to benefit from disenchantment with Zambia’s ailing economy and a depressed global market for its most important export, copper. His party, moreover, the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND), benefitted from the support of several high-profile defectors from Lungu’s Patriotic Front (PF). Results show that Hichilema did predictably well in the south of the country, Lungu won most of his votes in his northern base and, however narrowly, in the vote-rich capital, Lusaka, and in the Copperbelt province in central Zambia.

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In fact, the results don’t look especially different from the results of last January’s presidential by-election, when Lungu (then Zambia’s defense minister) succeeded the late Michael Sata, though Lungu’s margin of victory (around 100,000 votes) is much wider in this year’s election than in the 2015 race (around 28,000). The 2016 election, moreover, featured much higher turnout — perhaps befitting the fact that Lungu, if his victory is confirmed, is now set to serve a full five-year term through 2021. Continue reading Lungu wins narrow victory in Zambia as opposition cries foul →

Honduras

Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly?

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TEGUCIGALPA — In the shadow of the June 2009 coup that ousted leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans will vote on Sunday to determine whether Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya will become the Central American country’s new president.honduras flag icon

Despite a polarizing three-way campaign that pits the Zelayas against the two traditional Honduran political parties, with stark divisions over economic and security policy, how secure can Honduras and the region be that the vote will be essentially free and fair — and that the ballots will be counted fairly?

Candidates on both the left and the right bluster that they don’t fear electoral fraud, confident that their mandate will be strong enough for a clear victory.  But though international observers and representatives from each of Honduras’s political parties will be on hand to observer the counting on Sunday, there remains a nagging fear that a narrow election victory by any of the major presidential candidates would cause a political crisis, given the low level of public trust in Honduran public institutions.  Recently, U.S. congressmen Raúl M. Grijalva, Mike Honda and Hank Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry warning of possible fraud:

“We are particularly alarmed to learn that the ruling party, and its presidential candidate Mr. Juan Orlando Hernández, now dominates all the key institutions of the government, including the country’s electoral authority and the military, which distributes the ballots,” they wrote, “leaving scarce recourse for Honduran citizens should fraud be committed in the electoral process, or human rights violations continue to threaten open debate.  This is particularly troubling given the long history of electoral fraud in Honduras, including allegations of widespread fraud during the primary elections in November of 2012.”

In those primary elections, Hernández narrowly defeated popular Tegucigalpa mayor Ricardo Álvarez for the presidential nomination of the conservative National Party, but refused to brook the ballot recount that Álvarez’s campaign requested.  Though the two candidates have long since united, no one can say with certainty that Hernández actually won the vote, and that’s left some doubt about the capacity of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to guarantee ballot sanctity in Sunday’s general elections.

Though Central America isn’t necessarily always on the front pages, Honduras’s election is especially important to the United States.  The 2009 coup was one of the first foreign policy crises for U.S. president Barack Obama, and the United States has devoted increasing military aid in the attempt to combat drug trafficking in Honduras.  Moreover, Honduras’s general election is the first of four that will be held over the next six months in Central America – El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama will all choose new presidents between now and May 2014.

Dr. Leo Valladares, a former Honduran commissioner of human rights and a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agreed with the warnings about potential ballot abuse.  “There are possibilities for fraud,” Valladares admitted. “In theory, the National Party could win without fraud. But they’re not secure, so they might commit fraud. Whatever the outcome of the election, it will be very conflicted.”

Hernández’s chief rivals in Sunday’s vote are Mauricio Villeda, the candidate of the more centrist Liberal Party, a Tegucigalpa attorney and the son of former president Ramón Villeda Morales (1975-63), and Castro de Zelaya who, with her husband, left the Liberal Party to form the new leftist Party of Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) in 2011.

Jacobo Hernández Cruz, a former vice president and former TSE head, however, argued that over the past decade, Honduran electoral authorities have made great strides toward enhancing electoral transparency.

“The only way there can be fraud [previously] is in null votes,” Hernández said.  “But now when they count, everyone can see.  This has been the case for eight years.  Open doors and open windows, everyone can see.  It’s out in public.”

Historically, transparency and observation of the vote count represents the greatest check against vote fraud in Honduran elections.  But other concerns remain, especially over how the ballot boxes arrive to the polling stations.

“The boxes come with the electoral custodian,” Hernández said. “The armed forces bring them. There is always trust in the armed forces.  The ballots are going to be scanned. There’s a procedure for how this will be done.” Continue reading Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly? →