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Reporters fill gaps in polls coverage
John Allen, AllAfrica Blog
March 31, 2008

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310922.html

Media seeking to provide comprehensive coverage of the Zimbabwean elections face a dilemma: how to report the official results from the electoral commission in Harare - which began to trickle out on Monday morning, Central African Time - against a backdrop of deep suspicion among many observers of the process which produced them.

The nature of the challenge facing not only journalists but election observers who want to maintain credibility was outlined in an interview our Verna Rainers conducted with an experienced Southern African election observer as voters prepared to head for the polls.

Denis Kadima, executive director of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA), told us:

"People can campaign wherever they want... and it does not seem like there is any attempt to harass people.... Even the opposition parties and candidates recognize that there is a great improvement."

But, he added:

"It's not easy to come to a conclusion. People can come [to Zimbabwe] and see the peacefulness and get briefings from... parties and see long queues and they will be satisfied and say it was free and fair. But it may be a superficial assessment. There are many grey areas in these elections."

Our story outlines those grey areas and illustrates them with items from our previous election coverage.

So the question we're asking right now is: assuming that voting went well in most of the country on polling day, and that people cast their ballots the way they wanted to, do the figures being announced in Harare reflect how the voters marked their ballot papers?

The long delay between the closing of polling stations on Saturday evening and the announcement of results has, as we have reported in some detail from a wide variety of our partner publishers, led many to suspect the answer to that question might be: No.

Some reporters clearly decided early that Harare wasn't the best place to find answers.

One was Craig Timberg of the Washington Post, who didn't have to go far to find his story. He went to the rural Chinoyi constitutuency, north-west of Harare on the way to Lake Kariba.

In a piece headlined "Tallies Show Mugabe Vulnerable" [free registration may be required to read full report] he reported that Chinoyi was one of the areas in the past where President Robert Mugabe's "outsize victories helped balance out his eroding support in [the] cities."

What he found there was a notice on a community hall showing that the opposition's Morgan Tsvangirai had beaten Mugabe, not by a narrow margin but with twice Mugabe's votes. With supplementary reporting fleshing out his picture, Timberg wrote:

"The growing mosaic of information, though informally collected, suggested Mugabe was decisively trailing Tsvangirai... It remained far from clear whether Mugabe, 84, would step down or whether the results officially announced by an electoral commission controlled by his cronies would show anything but a Mugabe victory. But any rigging mechanisms have been undermined by the decision, for the first time in Zimbabwe, to post the results at polling stations."

But particularly intriguing was a report from the Associated Press. It was not bylined (could it have come from AP's experienced correspondent Angus Shaw?) but it reported on a visit to Mugabe's birthplace.

There, the reporter found:

"The doors of polling stations... are bare. No election results have been posted here, hours after most votes around the country were counted and displayed... Independent monitors said that could be because Mugabe's ruling party has lost at least one parliamentary seat in the district."

At the district vote-counting centre, an official told AP they were short of paper - in "one of the more prosperous rural areas of Zimbabwe thanks to Mugabe's patronage." And ballot boxes were arriving there 22 hours after voting ended.

The last words of the story came from an elderly voter who stiffened and whose eyes darted to armed police as he spoke:

"We need change," he whispered.

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