The Zimbabwe election results were finally announced. Presumably to the surprise of few, the incumbent President Mnangagwa of ZANU-PF has “won” and the party will have a two-thirds majority of the assembly (elected by FPTP and with high malapportionment).
Amazingly, Mnangagwa won just enough to not require a runoff! Yes, I am being cynical.
The official results apparently show ZANU-PF getting more votes for assembly than for presidency. That would be unusual for a major party in a presidential system, but here’s assuming that the gap was even greater than officially reported. Either that, or the assembly election was even more rigged than the presidential.
Also unusual–and for me a strong indicator that things were being cooked–is that the assembly result was released days before the presidential. I do not have actual records on these things, but I believe such a sequence is highly unusual. Usually they either come out together, or the presidential result gets announced first.
Another indicator of fraud is that the reported turnout went down between an earlier announcement and the final one. It is not hard to imagine that sufficient opposition votes were discarded to ensure Mnangagwa had over 50%.
Not much more to say, really. But if you want to have your say, here’s the space.
I highly recommend this post at On Elections:
While ZANU-PF does have a two-thirds majority of the single-member seats, that might not translate into an actual two-thirds majority in the Assembly, since there are still sixty seats reserved for women to be elected from non-compensatory provincial party lists based on vote totals for parties in the SMD seats.