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[washingtonpost.com]
On Tuesday, Edgar Lungu, incumbent president of Zambia, was sworn in for a second term, even though the opposition party is contesting the election results in Zambia’s courts.
August’s elections in Zambia were the hardest-fought in a generation. Opposition supporters clashed violently with incumbent party cadres and police, which led to an unprecedented temporary ban on campaign rallies in Lusaka during July. Incumbents controversially limited free media before the elections, and opposition supporters feared that the government would manipulate the ballots. In this context, Zambia needed — and still needs — trusted election monitors to safeguard the electoral process.
For this, most Zambians look to a longstanding coalition of Catholic, mainline Protestant and older evangelical churches. In a country that is more than 80 percent Christian, these institutions are more widely trusted and have deeper community roots than secular international observer missions. As Zambia’s attempt to democratize stalled in recent years, and disillusion with international observers mounted, this coalition of churches formalized its domestic election monitoring effort in 2014 by establishing the Christian Churches Monitoring Group (CCMG).
Today, however, CCMG — Zambia’s most trusted election monitoring group — is unable to comprehensively verify the fairness of the election. As we explain below, this is because the government divided access to different segments of the electoral process to different international and domestic observers, notably the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and CCMG.
The incumbent avoided a runoff by a margin of only 13,021 votes, in a country of more than 15 million
The main players in last month’s elections were the incumbent president, Edgar Lungu of the Patriotic Front, and Hakainde Hichilema, of the United Party for National Development. Four days after the elections, Zambia’s Electoral Commission announced that President Lungu won with 50.35 percent of the vote, compared to Hichilema’s 47.63 percent.
Only 13,021 votes stood between Lungu and a runoff election. For many, this suggested fraud.
Over the last month, Hichilema contested the election in Zambian courts. Among other things, he alleged that the PF collaborated with the state’s nonpartisan electoral commission to add foreigners or deceased individuals to the voter registries — the lists of registered voters allowed to cast ballots — in order to ensure a slim margin of victory for the ruling party. Ideally, Zambians would now turn to trusted, nonpartisan election observers to evaluate the fairness of the election, including the voter registries. They cannot.
International election observers can, in some circumstances, do more harm than good
Numerous international organizations send observer missions to Zambia. Yet, according to Judith Kelly, numerous international observers may do moreharm than good. In their research, Emily Beaulieu and Susan Hyde also find that although more and more governments are hosting international observers, incumbents simultaneously manipulate elections using less easily observable tactics (e.g., excluding rival candidates, advance manipulation of voter registries, or constraints on free media).
Darren Kew, Lisa Laasko and Cyril Obi argue that, in Africa, international observers from other African countries have failed to remain nonpartisan in the face of strong diplomatic interests, and Brian Klaas finds that international observers are significantly less likely to call African elections “unfree and unfair” than elections elsewhere, even when governments use the same manipulations.
Disillusioned with the state of election monitoring in Zambia, numerous civic leaders have advocated for domestic monitoring. The Rev. Suzanne Matale, general secretary of Zambia’s mainline protestant Council of Churches of Zambia, for instance, explained to us that while domestic observers can monitor “registration, the campaigns, [and] everything all the way until after the elections, the UN [UNDP observer mission] will come two days before the elections and they will concentrate on the long, quiet lines that day, and they will make huge decisions about how fair and how credible the elections had been.”
In 2014, amid increasing political and economic instability, Zambia’s four major faith-based organizations established the Christian Churches Monitoring Group (CCMG). In majority-Christian Zambia, a plurality of Zambians belong either to mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations, and a growing number identify as evangelical. CCMG member organizations reflect this composition, and include umbrella associations for mainline Protestants, Catholics and evangelicals, as well as the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection.
CCMG is funded by the U.S. and British development agencies, USAID and DFID, and receives technical assistance from the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. nongovernmental organization that promotes government accountability and citizen participation. CCMG was prepared to monitor voter registration, audit the voter registries, and undertake parallel vote tabulation (PVT) on election day. In PVT methodology, election monitors transmit vote counts directly from a representative sample of polling stations to an independent data center, which uses this data to predict national election results. Election observers then compare PVT estimates with official results to confirm that vote counts were not manipulated.
But as noted above, the Electoral Commission refused to let ……read more from the Wahington post ..
