Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Report — Of Stuffed ballots and Empty Stomachs almost all the candidates significantly exceeded the total number of votes cast as announced earlier. In a few constituencies the total figure announced was significantly lower than the previously announced figure. A full break down of the discrepancies appears in Table C at the end of this report. It also appears that several candidates were prevented from seeing the polling station returns when the aggregate was calculated by the Constituency Elections Officer. Furthermore, instead of immediately announcing the winner in the prescribed form, in some instances the Constituency Elections Officer sent the results to ZEC to announce.73 Not surprisingly, this set of circumstances led the opposition to immediately charge that the election had been rigged. Certainly, there were enough facts to support the suspicion. The early refusal to allow some election agents into polling stations, the administration of the electoral process from top to bottom by ZANU(PF) sympathisers, the supervisory role of the police in the voting process, the strange halt of the counting process, the failure to show some election agents the returns, the failure to post the returns at the polling stations timeously or at all, the filtering of the results through the National Elections Logistic Committee, and the discrepancy in the figures initially released by ZEC and the final tally were highly suspicious to an already deeply distrustful electorate. Matters were compounded when ZEC failed to provide any plausible explanation for the discrepancies in its figures and refused to release a detailed breakdown of the voting by polling station. Some felt that the peculiar increase in the number of voters above the initially announced ZEC figures was clear evidence of stuffing and the manipulation of the count by the National Elections Logistics Committee. It was feared that stuffing had taken place early in the day when election agents had been excluded from the polling stations, during the period after polling when the count was halted74 or that thousands of postal votes had been distributed to chosen constituencies in a manner which would secure victory for ZANU(PF). These allegations need some analysis. Unfortunately, in order to do a comprehensive analysis one requires access to the polling station returns throughout the country. ZEC has, without justification, refused to publish these results. The figures for each polling station provided by the MDC’s election agents are in almost all instances incomplete. It seems that the large number of polling stations overstretched the MDC’s capacity in this regard. The MDC had difficulty appointing sufficient suitable personnel. Often the polling stations were attended by 73 74 See Election Petition of Heather Bennett para 31. See Election Petition of Eliphas Mukonoweshuro para 77 &78. 24