Former United States president Jimmy Carter gave Mozambique’s third multi-party elections a tentative thumbs-up on Friday despite a poor turnout, saying the two days of voting appeared to have gone off well.
Carter said of the polls, which were held on Wednesday and Thursday: ”This time we interrogated any obsevers who were there, especially from the opposition parties… and we have found that they had no complaints or problems.”
However, Carter said: ”All I can judge so far is what we have seen in the first few days.”
The former US leader, the most prominent of the estimated 400 observers monitoring the elections which will see President Joaquim Chissano step down after 18 years, visited polling stations in the capital Maputo.
”I understand that out of the 10,1 million names on the [voters’] list only about 7,5 million are alive or actually eligible to vote,” he said.
”I haven’t seen the final turnout . My rough estimate is that about 30% of voters participated, almost all of them on the first day.
”But this is less than half the turnout compared to 1999,” Carter said, referring to the last elections, which he monitored with observers from the Carter Centre, putting the turn-out then at around 68% and adding that the poor turnout was ”of concern”.
But he hedged a question of whether the increasing slide in turnout from the country’s first elections since independence and the end of a brutal civil war in 1994 pointed to a growing disenchantment with democracy and the electoral process.
”I would not attribute any motivation,” he said, adding that the possibilities included the premise that ”people don’t like the process itself or they don’t feel that their vote will make a difference”, or they were simply undecided who to vote for.
Referring to the last elections, Carter said: ”We had a major concern in 1999 when a large numbers of returns from individual polling places were thrown out by the CNE [National Elections Commission] in secret and we were never given access to all those.
”That was about seven percent of the vote, which could have changed the outcome of the election in 1999,” he said, adding that he hoped this would not happen again.
The CNE and foreign observers — including those from the European Union, which has funded more than 70% of the cost of the elections — are in a stand-off over giving the observers access to the place where the final vote tabulation is to take place. – Sapa-AFP