Observers leave before counting of ballots?

At a news conference here on Wednesday, presidential candidate Simba
Makoni’s campaign co ordinator, Nkosana Moyo, said foreign observers were
accredited only until voting day. According to the former Zimbabwean cabinet
minister, this raised the question of who would monitor the counting and the
likely second round run-off, should Saturday’s presidential vote produce no
clear winner.In terms of Zimbabwe’s constitution, if none of the presidential candidates gets 51% of the vote or more, a run-off between the top two contenders must take place within 21 days. Although this had no precedent, analysts predict that the second round could determine what appears to be a closely contested presidential poll.A senior member of the 54-person South African observer team, who did not
want to be named for fear of breaching protocol, told Business Day that although their
accreditation tags had March 29 as the expiry date, they were told this was
a mistake. “They acknowledged that they made a mistake, we did check,” he
said. But the cards had not been changed. “We will be here until the end,”
the official said.