SW Radio Africa
By Violet Gonda, SW Radio Africa
The MDC legal team led by David Coltart has said that investigations for the controversial 2002 presidential election have exposed massive rigging by the Mugabe regime. The investigations, which will be made public within the next month, will show wide spread voter fraud and breaches of the electoral act. Coltart said the team discovered that some people voted twice while others voted 3 times.
The allegations come in the wake of a decision by the High Court Justice Ben Hlatshwayo to dismiss Morgan Tsvangirai’s election petition. In his decision handed down on Monday, the judge said the petition shouldn’t be used to achieve political objectives. Coltart said the opposition party was deeply concerned by this judgment. He said it “ignores the fact that we relied on purely legal and constitutional arguments.”
Hlatshwayo had taken 2 years to come up with this decision after the MDC had again been forced to go to the Supreme Court arguing that the judge’s delay was unconstitutional. It has been a struggle for the opposition party to challenge the results of the presidential elections. The Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede originally denied the MDC the right to examine all electoral materials like the voters roll and ballot boxes. He only complied this year after the opposition party won a court order.
Coltart said inspection of the voters’ roll has been revealing. He said although some of the ballot boxes have been infested by termites and eaten away, the MDC has been able to examine voting materials in 12 constituencies and have revealed breaches of the electoral act.