What do you do if you’ve been the president of a country for 20 years and you want to stay that way for life, but you’ve been told that, despite your best efforts at repressing the opposition and harassing people who vote for them, you’ve been voted out of office? The latest creative way of handling this situation, according to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, is to delay the announcement of the results and instruct the electoral commission to recount the votes until they come out in your favour.
Whilst in the good old days the results could be rigged simply by ignoring what the actual votes said and announcing a tally which gave the incumbent a strong majority, things are a bit more difficult this time around because, in an effort to appear transparent, the results of counting were posted outside each counting centre. A simple act of addition makes it obvious what the tally should come to. So how do you address this problem? You need to get hold of the containers which hold the votes, replace unfavourable votes with favourable ones, recount them to discover that the tally actually comes out in your favour, then punish the fraudulent behaviour of the electoral officials who counted the votes initially. However, this process takes time.
This morning’s news is that the Zimbabwe High Court has rejected a bid by the opposition for an order requiring the electoral commission to release the results of the presidential election. What else could the judge have done? He would certainly have been subject to reprisals. On Saturday leaders from nearby countries had an emergency meeting to discuss the impasse, but failed to resolve anything. What could they do without involving cost and risk to themselves?