How they are rigging the election at this very moment

Mugabe's spies are using a simple but effective technique to rob Tsvangirai of victory - and not be caught doing it

Harare, Zimbabwe, Tuesday, April 1, 5.0 pm

Sources within the fearsome Central Intelligence Agency (CIO) have told me this afternoon that the Zimbabwe security chiefs, who nearly came to blows yesterday, have reached a compromise - and instructed the CIO to finally fix this election in Mugabe's favour.

The CIO's task is to falsify the voting figures in a way that appears to give logical and expected results, and thus becomes unchallengeable. With the eyes of the world on this election, the power men know that any fraud has to be virtually undetectable.

The technique was explained to me by my source, who told me it is being put into effect at this moment. This is how it works.

In the case of the race for the position of President, votes are being stolen from Tsvangirai. The votes have to be credited to another candidate, to keep voting numbers correct. But they are not being given to Mugabe. They go instead to Simba Makoni.

Why? Because there are some areas - Bulawayo is a good example - where Zanu-PF parliamentary candidates have made such a poor showing that any extra votes recorded there for Mugabe, the party leader, would seem illogical, and rightly condemned as evidence of rigging.

But by diminishing Tsvangirai's vote total and giving the difference to Makoni, Mugabe gains overall, and no-one will query the higher total for Makoni, who in any case was expected to do better than he has.

If this technique is applied across the nation, it will certainly be sufficiently effective to either give Mugabe an overall victory, or at least ensure a runoff.

Virtually the same technique is being applied to fix the parliamentary elections. Only in this case votes are taken from the candidates of the Tsvangirai faction of the MDC, and added to the totals of candidates from the smaller faction led by Arthur Mutambara.

Once again it is Zanu-PF that benefits by cutting down the votes for the Tsvangirai candidates, and giving the seats to the Mutambara faction.

The plan can be seen working already in the so-called official results. The Mutambara faction failed dismally in early returns, but has recently mysteriously gained ground against the Tsvangirai faction, and now commands, for instance, five seats in Matabeleland.

That's the joint plan to fix these elections, put as simply as I can. Those who wonder why the results are being held back and released so slowly need wonder no more.

Comments

[chaurura]

Well it seems likely but what about if they produce marked differnces with those pasted at polling stations? What about the pronouncement by the ZEC that represantatives of each presidential candidate must be present when the votes are being counted? Doesn't it seem logical that each represantative will approach it with a sniffing and suscipicious mood to the extent that such irregularities will be identified as soon as possible. I am sure that every represantative will have his/her own working papers where he/she will try his/her best to ensure that the ZEC results are as near as possible to his/hers. Food for thought, Moses!