The truth about elections, held to a single standard.

Acórdão 24/CC/2024 places the epicentre of the discrepancies in the intermediate district count, where it says the data were inflated, and partially invalidates Deliberação 105/CNE/2024 of 24 October, in the part concerning the districts it lists, across Maputo City and the provinces of Maputo, Gaza, Inhambane, Tete, Zambézia and Nampula; for Manica, Sofala, Cabo Delgado and Niassa, where the volume of litigation did not warrant requisitioning the records, it assessed the election on the parties' copies alone. Re-tabulating from the polling-station results sheets, the Council reduced Daniel Chapo from 70.67 to 65.17 per cent and FRELIMO from 195 to 171 of 250 seats, while raising PODEMOS from 31 to 43, RENAMO from 20 to 28 and MDM from 4 to 8.

The EU mission reported instances of fraudulent alteration of polling results, deliberate invalidation of opposition votes and several instances of results manipulation conducted at district level. Analysing 121 of the 161 district provisional results, it found seven districts where the number of votes cast in the legislative election ran far above the presidential election - Chibuto by 15 per cent, Inhambane City and Maxixe by 21, Kamubukwana by 24, Quelimane by 30, Pebane by 60 and Massinga by 83 - that practically all the additional votes went to the ruling party, and that in those seven districts alone FRELIMO appeared to have been unduly awarded over 150,000 extra votes. In Manhiça, where observers tallied the polling-station results as they were read aloud, Daniel Chapo was announced with 42,485 votes against the roughly 28,000 the observers had summed. In four districts of Zambézia observers were asked to leave the tabulation centre on the second day after noting differences between polling-station and tabulated figures.

PODEMOS submitted a parallel count covering, by its own account, 59.95 per cent of the total vote, giving Mondlane 4,419,040 votes or 53.38 per cent. The Council pointed out that the submission's total of 8,244,403 valid votes already exceeded the commission's entire national valid-vote total of 6,961,925 by 1,282,478, and exceeded the 7,238,027 people recorded as having voted by 1,006,376; scaled to 100 per cent coverage it would have implied more votes than there were registered voters. Recounting the results sheets PODEMOS itself supplied, the Council obtained 2,229,609 valid votes, with Chapo on 57.79 per cent and Mondlane on 31.67 per cent, and dismissed the request. What this refutes is the parallel count as submitted; it does not establish what an accurate national count would have shown, and no recount of ballots was ever conducted.

The Council held that copies of the polling-station results sheets in the hands of political parties carry the same legal force as those supplied by the commission, and that comparing the two sets was enough to locate where the discrepancies arose, making the second option, a recount of the ballots, unnecessary. It did not publish the criteria by which it accepted one sheet over another, or which individual sheets it accepted or rejected. The Mozambican Bar Association said in a 13 December statement that this comparison of results sheets did not follow the legal criteria for validating documentary proof and was illegal, and recommended either a recount or annulment of the election. The EU mission found that the Council modified the commission's result without providing a sound legal basis and recommended that future validations state the criteria used. Two domestic observer consortiums, Mais Integridade and Decide, refused to hand over their own copies of the results sheets, telling the Council in December that the documents they held would not help establish the electoral truth and would serve to legitimise fraud.