Team Pachedu, a team of data analysts, says they have started auditing several discrepancies that they claim to have found in the Zimbabwe 2023 presidential election results announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairperson, Justice Priscilla Chigumba on Saturday night.
According to ZEC, ZANU PF candidate Emmerson Mnangagwa had 2,350,711 votes which translate to 52.6%, beating his closest competitor Nelson Chamisa who received 1 967 343 which translates to 44% of the total votes cast.
However, in a statement issued this Sunday, 27 August 2022, Team Pachedu they will, in due course, publish all the discrepancies in the figures which ZEC announced. Reads the statement:
We have taken note of the official Presidential Election results that were announced yesterday by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission chairperson, Justice Priscilla Chigumba.
For us, the huge task has begun as we are already scrupulously auditing several discrepancies that we have found on the announced presidential totals vis-à-vis the data that we collated.
We wish to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who has assisted us thus far by either volunteering to be polling agents, local observers, or by assisting financially and morally.
One of our priority resolutions for the 2023 general election was the need to leverage technology as much as we could to help mitigate the perennial electoral fraud.
Through our own and citizen support, we managed to deploy two systems, Buhle and Mandla. While Buhle is a big data app that helped us to unearth 746,871 serious discrepancies that were on the 11 July release of the 2023 Voters’ Roll, Mandla, on the other hand, focused on Parallel Vote Tabulation.
The deployment model of Mandla was centered on the polling agents as the ultimate end users for the sake of data quality assurance.
This meant that we had to collaborate with political parties and organisations that were deploying agents and observers.
Unfortunately, Mandla was ultimately not officially endorsed and used by one of our key partners on election day.
This severely crippled Mandla’s scope, that is, real-time national collation. Most of the valuable data that we eventually collected in real-time using Mandla on voting day was through partner CSOs and unofficially from agents on the ground. We ended up without complete national coverage.
Despite this severe limitation, we managed, against all odds, to collate ample data in Mandla both on election day and post-election that we are now using to audit several discrepancies in the figures that ZEC announced yesterday, along with the discrepancies that we have already identified on the official V23A, V23B, V23C and V23D forms.
A big thank you to all the peace-loving Zimbabweans and all the election agents who worked tirelessly on, and post, election day.
We thank you all for voting in peace and for being tolerant in the face of a very hostile electoral environment.
To all those who supported the project and believed in it, we are deeply humbled. Yesterday’s announcement was not the end but is just the beginning.
We shall be publicly publishing all the discrepancies in the figures which ZEC announced.
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