Zimbabwe at “familiar tipping point”

Five days after the General Election, anxiety is growing over the suspicious delay in the announcement of voting results.

Zimbabwe’s electoral commission has conceded that the combined opposition has won a parliamentary majority. However, it is not as forthcoming on presidential election results.

A day after a State-run newspaper predicted a runoff election, the opposition claimed no second round of voting was needed as Mr Morgan Tsvangirai had won the election outright. The figures they provided to back this argument, however, showed Tsvangirai with only 49 per cent of the vote, just short of a majority.

A second round seems inevitable.

Unlike Kenya’s first-past-the-post system, which allows few options for dealing with a close vote other than the courts or the streets, Zimbabwe’s two-round runoff system could be the mechanism that forces a relatively peaceful transition following President Robert Mugabe’s five-term rule.

While a runoff presents certain dangers — such as a new opportunity for electoral fraud and increased violence from the army, the police and Mugabe’s Zanu-Patriotic Front war veterans’ — it also holds the promise of putting the question of who the people want to rest once and for all.

Tsvangirai, who heads the Movement for Democratic Change, and the leading independent candidate, Mr Simba Makoni, have agreed in principle to join forces if the race goes into a runoff. With Makoni commanding about seven per cent of the vote, this pairing will be a decisive factor.

There is a lesson here for Kenya.

As part of the long-term issues we consider to avoid the problems the country faced last year, we may want to look at ways of reforming the voting systems we rely on at the party and national levels.

Runoff voting could turn close or complicated elections into contests with a clear winner. They could help thin aspirant lists for political parties or provide clear winners in presidential races.

The United States uses a type of run-off voting to select the various party nominees for President. Senator John McCain won the Republican contest earlier this year, but his Democratic Party rivals, senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are still battling it out in an exhaustive ballot — which relies on having as many rounds of voting as are necessary until one candidate has a majority.

Two-round voting systems are common for presidential elections in many countries.

We need to ask ourselves whether they would serve us better than the current plurality system, and whether to use them only for our presidential polls or also in party primaries.