Freeman Chari, a US-based software engineer and opposition activist, has made a surprising admission regarding the 2023 harmonised elections in Zimbabwe.
Chari, who previously worked with the election monitoring group Team Pachedu and later developed the election-monitoring app Mandla, has confirmed that President Emmerson Mnangagwa secured more than 50% of the presidential vote.
In a statement released on Friday, August 23, exactly one year after the polls, Chari claimed to have collated results from 84% of the V11 forms (the official vote tallying forms).
His analysis showed that President Mnangagwa garnered 52% of the vote. Chari also acknowledged that his tally excluded many votes from ZANU PF strongholds in the Mashonaland provinces, suggesting that Mnangagwa’s actual vote share was even higher.
This revelation appears to explain why Nelson Chamisa, the CCC candidate who had disputed the election results, chose not to file a formal election petition challenging the outcome.
Some political analysts believe Chari’s data-driven admission has undercut the opposition’s claims of electoral fraud. Wrote Chari on X:
Thank you for your patience. It is the 1st anniversary of the elections. We all worked hard to mobilize resources and encourage people to vote.
We went into a flawed election hoping that maybe we could overwhelm the system. From the delimitation process to voters roll, to the election day ballot crisis, it was clear that everything was skewed against the opposition.
On the eve of the elections, the Harare regime hunted down people who were doing parallel voter tabulation. A number of people were arrested.
Fortunately, none of our volunteers were affected but they operated under great danger to themselves. Having more than 50 people’s lives at stake was a huge burden.
We did the best we could to collate results. And citizens did amazingly great by sending us the V11s from their polling stations.
Within the first 2 days, we had collated about 75% of the polling stations. We eventually were able to collate 10 250 polling stations in which we could verify their results.
These represent about 84% of all polling stations used. We did receive a lot of results from other polling stations which we could not authenticate or verify.
I have excluded those results from this spreadsheet. The results on this spreadsheet only represent the polling stations we could back with signed and stamped v11s.
We got a lot of dubious results from Mashonaland East, Central and West. Those polling stations have been excluded.
We chose also not to even release these results in 2023 in the backdrop of the SADC report because we felt we were not in the business of legitimizing sham elections.
We hoped CCC would reject the whole election in toto. Unfortunately, some decided to go to parliament and councils.
At the end of the day, I hope we all now are going to have honest conversations, now that you know a bit of what we knew.
More: Pindula News