Ballot Fraud Casts Shadow on S. Africa Vote

Whoever stuffed the ballot boxes in the Zulu strongholds of northern Natal last week did a good job--too good perhaps.

“There were sealed ballot boxes in which there were 3,000-odd votes, and all the ballots were neatly stacked up inside,” explained John Wills, a lawyer and election observer in Empangeni. “It’s physically impossible if people are voting one by one.”

Wills also found “widespread indications” of voters casting ballots under the legal age of 18, and scores of full ballot boxes “coming from polling stations that didn’t officially exist,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Growing evidence of other polling abuses, compounded by computer sabotage, communications snafus and mind-boggling confusion, has begun to tarnish the golden glow of South Africa’s historic all-race election. Six days after the counting began, there are still no certified results to back African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela’s claim of victory Monday as the nation’s first black president.

Instead, counting and reporting of returns--which stopped for 32 hours Tuesday and Wednesday--stalled again all day Thursday as outside auditors and computer experts swarmed into offices of the Independent Electoral Commission in hopes of sorting out what increasingly appears a case of poor planning, chaotic administration and inadequate safeguards.

Johann Kriegler, the electoral commission chairman, told reporters Wednesday that someone had “tampered” with the computer program used to tabulate the vote totals, causing what he called a “trivial difference” in tallies.

But he said a fallback “manual system”--handwritten accounting books used at each counting station--would provide an accurate count.

“Extraordinary measures have been taken to ensure the integrity of the results from the manual system are as trustworthy as human precautions can make them,” he promised.

They weren’t good enough. The manual system turned out to be riddled with mistakes from people filling out forms incorrectly, electoral commission spokeswoman Nikki Moore said Thursday.

“They discovered discrepancies that didn’t make sense and couldn’t be explained,” she said. “So everything ground to a halt again.”

Moore said she is sure that the problem is not deliberate fraud, but “monumental incompetence” within her own organization. And she accused top electoral commission officials of “trying to cover up” the problems by refusing to provide accurate information.

“Now there’s so much rumor and speculation,” she complained. “I stopped talking to the press because even I didn’t believe the IEC.”

No one here doubts that Mandela’s ANC has won. The questions are by how much and where.

The latest tallies, released late Thursday and based on 72% of the estimated 23 million votes cast, pushed the ANC landslide to 64.7% of the total.

That means the ANC is within reach of its goal of winning two-thirds of the vote, enough for a veto-proof majority to rewrite the interim constitution without compromising with other parties in the new coalition government. Even Mandela has said he is uneasy about a potential “tyranny of the majority.”

Outgoing President Frederik W. de Klerk’s National Party had fallen to 20.6% of the vote. Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party had 8.1%, while the Freedom Front, which demands a separate white homeland, was in fourth place with 2.3%.

Kriegler said he was confident that the electoral commission will finish counting and certify the results by Monday night, the legal deadline.

Much rides on the timetable, because the new National Assembly must convene Monday to formally elect Mandela president. He is due to be inaugurated the next day in ceremonies in Pretoria before scores of international dignitaries and more than 100,000 South Africans.

For now, the greatest worry is the power struggle in the volatile KwaZulu-Natal area, still under a state of emergency from heavy pre-election violence. The vote for the provincial legislature is now a matter of fierce dispute.

The ANC swept seven of the eight other provinces, losing only the Western Cape to the National Party. That was expected because the province holds a majority of mixed-race voters sympathetic to De Klerk.

But the ANC apparently has lost the heavily populated KwaZulu-Natal area as well. In latest returns, Inkatha led the ANC, by 50.8% to 31.6%. That reverses pre-election polls. It is especially startling because Inkatha did not formally join the long campaign until a week before voting began.

The two rival parties have accused one another of extensive cheating. The electoral commission announced Wednesday that it found no evidence of “any coordinated so-called wide-scale fraud.”

But an ANC spokeswoman in Johannesburg, Baleka Kgositsile, said Thursday that the congress had renewed its complaints to the electoral commission that voting in some areas was obviously rigged and should be discarded. Barring that, she said, the ANC was prepared to demand a new election in the KwaZulu-Natal area.

“We can’t believe these figures,” Kgositsile said. “They are obviously not true.”

The ANC has complained that Inkatha set up 54 “pirate” polls without international observers or electoral commission authorization. In other areas, they said, tribal chiefs essentially hijacked the polling stations and forced out all independent observers and ANC workers. In all, the ANC said, about 250,000 votes were potentially fraudulent.

But Inkatha’s political director and spokesman, Ziba Jiyani, complained that the ANC was simply being “irresponsible and mean-spirited,” because it was losing.

“We have evidence of massive fraud on the part of the ANC,” he said. “But in the interest of peace, we said ‘OK, let the counting continue.’ Then they tampered with the computer. . . . They’ve been taking our votes away.”

He said ballot boxes from several Inkatha strongholds in Natal and other provinces disappeared en route to counting stations, or were later found stuffed with straw. Many polling stations never got ballots, he said, or special stickers to add for the late-registering Inkatha.

In some areas, he added, ballots already marked for the ANC were handed to voters waiting in line.

“And in some cases, people’s hands were not inked, so they could vote many times over,” he charged.

Electoral commission officials said it was impossible to confirm many of the allegations.

And officials said the impasse in Natal will not delay the inauguration.

The real worry is longer term. The bitter rivalry between the ANC and Inkatha has claimed thousands of lives in the last decade and violence could explode again if either side is convinced that the election was stolen. Inter-party fighting, which subsided during the voting, has already resumed.

Joe Matuna, director of the independent Institute for Multi-Party Democracy in Durban, the provincial capital, warned of “large-scale problems” if current results are overturned.

“We can have democracy, but when it comes to really running Zululand, it would be difficult to have anybody but a Zulu from Inkatha,” he said.