BY STAFF REPORTER
HARARE
The MDC has written to the chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, George Chiweshe, demanding an explanation for the huge discrepancies in ZEC’s own figures for the results of the presidential election held on March 29.
According to the ZEC, MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai won 47.9 per cent of the vote, while Robert Mugabe got 43.2 per cent, meaning that neither candidate secured the 50 per cent necessary to avoid a run-off.
The MDC rejected these results as fraudulent and is seeking an explanation from the ZEC about why its figures differ from those tabulated on the V11 forms posted outside polling stations immediately after the election.
The MDC says 80,000 votes for Tsvangirai, or 3.4 per cent of the total poll, have simply vanished between March 29 and last Friday when the ZEC eventually released the results. This would have given him the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to avoid any run-off.
The party’s Secretary-General, Tendai Biti, in his letter to Chiweshe says: “We would like to advise you that you should not take us for morons. In the circumstances we request and demand that you answer our letter on its merit and give us an explanation as to how and why the discrepancies referred to arose.
“What we require from you is an explanation as to where you got the figures you announced on national television. Put differently – what was the source of those figures. And why are they so different from the official ones. We await a substantive answer to our original request no later than the end of Monday May 5.”
Chiweshe has, in the past, dismissed the figures posted outside the polling stations as “merely incomplete updates”. Â
Post published in: News