Mozambique: Will Criticisms of Venezuela’s Election Change How Mozambique’s Election is Seen?

Both the United States and European Union have been highly critical of the 28 July Venezuela presidential election. The Venezuela National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral, CNE) declared Nicolás Maduro re-elected with 52% of the vote, against 43% for Edmundo González.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said there was “overwhelming evidence” that González won. EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, announced that the European Council, the heads of state or government of the 27 EU member states, “decided that Maduro has no democratic legitimacy as president.”

Yet the US and EU are criticising aspects of the Venezuela that have long been true in Mozambique, and the international community has accepted the legitimacy of Frelimo victories. For example, in a 29 July statement the EU’s Borrell said “The EU calls on the Venezuelan Electoral Council (CNE) to exercise maximum transparency in the process of results tabulation, including the granting of immediate access to the voting records of each polling station and the publication of disaggregated election results.”

The last time the Mozambican CNE published detailed voting tallies and records of each polling station was in 2009. The tallies of 2014 were given to the international community, but not published in Mozambique. No detailed tallies have been available since then.

Borrell also stressed that there was no way to “verify” the results of the Venezuela election. This has always been true in Mozambique. Since the first multiparty election in 1994, the Mozambican CNE has always claimed the right to change results in secret and not keep any record of those changes. There has never been a way to “verify” Mozambican results.

The Constitutional Council (CC) does report if it makes changes to the results but does not explain them. And the CC had admitted is used secret CNE documents in its deliberations.

Bliken in a 1 August statement said “the democratic opposition has published more than 80 percent of the tally sheets received directly from polling stations throughout Venezuela. Those tally sheets indicate that Edmundo González Urrutia received the most votes in this election by an insurmountable margin.” Yet last year Renamo gave CIP their copies of the official polling station editais – the polling station tally or results sheets. With tally sheets from 94% of polling stations in Maputo, these official copies gave Renamo 55% of the votes and Frelimo only 37%. For Matola, with 88% of the tally sheets, Renamo had 59% and Frelimo 34%. (CIP Eleicoes 160) Yet there was no statement from the United States saying that Renamo had won, even though the percentage of tally sheets was higher in Maputo and Matola than in Venezuela; instead the fake Frelimo victory claim was accepted.

There was an even odder aspect to the national count. The CNE in a 17 November 2023 statement said it did not itself check the polling station editais (tally sheets), but merely accepted the tallies of the district elections commissions. However, the judge in the Nhlamankulu District Court in Maputo city found it proven that the district STAE introduced fake editais (polling station tally sheets) and that in a meeting in which Renamo was not present the district election commission approved these fakes to give the victory to Frelimo. She said it was also proven that in the district tabulation there was “repeated posting of results from the same polling station on the basis of falsified editais in favour of the Frelimo party, despite the protest of the opposition members”. (CIP Eleicoes 157, 180) Again there was no comment from the EU or USA.

Finally we note that in five provinces the CNE says that for this year’s election it registered 1.2 million more voters than there are voting age adults. (CIP Eleições 262).

The question for Mozambique’s 9 October elections will be if the US and EU apply the same standards in Mozambique as they have in Venezuela. Or will global politics determine? Venezuela has huge oil and gas reserved and the US has imposed sanctions. Venezuela has gained support from US company Chevron (with a sanctions waiver) and Iran and China. Mozambique has important gas reserves, but that are controlled by US, French, Italian and South African companies. Do countries only have to produce detailed electoral results if they also control their own resource sector?