UGANDA'S FLAWED ELECTIONS: Free, fair or flawed? Observers give their final verdict on polls

Ballot boxes not having seals and padlocks were some of the issues raised by the observers. Today, Daily Monitor turns attention to the count and also gives the Commonwealth Observers’ final verdict.

The Count

128. The count began in most polling stations at about 2.00 p.m. on 11 December 1980 so that anticipated difficulties as to insufficient light generally did not materialise. Each party polling agent was treated as a counting agent for the purposes of the count at his polling station, so that representatives of all the parties contesting each constituency were enabled to be present, and were present, during this most important phase of the poll. Outside polling stations, hundreds of those which had voted there earlier gathered at an early hour to await the outcome.

129. Generally the count began with a joint inspection of each box to determine whether or not it had been tampered with. The first box was then opened and the votes counted and recorded before they were bundled up and placed back inside it. The first box was then securely closed before the second box was opened, and so on. As a ballot paper was not required to be marked with the party of the voter's preference, it was essential that there be no possibility of the various bundles of votes becoming mixed.

130. The inspection of the boxes included on examination of the labels to ensure that these had not been exchanged or replaced with those of other parties. As the labels had not been affixed in a uniform fashion, the possibility of this occurring without its being detected seemed to us to be slight.

Certainly during our visit to as many as 1476 polling stations no suggestion was made to us either that boxes had been tampered with or that labels had been changed. In addition, many of the boxes contained improvised labels inside, and these were required to correspond to the party labels on the outside. This was done with the agreement of all the party agents and in their presence.

131. The actual count was performed out loud and in many of the polling stations we visited the numbers were chanted in chorus by party agents and polling staff alike. Boxes were either emptied out on to mats - and the box of one party we saw turned out to be completely empty suggesting that the two polling agents appointed by it had in fact voted for another party! or, with a sense of theatre, the presiding officer removed one ballot paper at a time from the box, holding it up for all to see that it had been validated and maintaining suspense to the last. Party agents occasionally conducted their own independent count and the memory lingers of one particular party ‘polling agent who three times checked the nine votes his party had received at his station.

132. At the conclusion of the count the figures were entered on a form designed by the Electoral Commission. The agents off each party were required to countersign this return, and were in addition provided with a copy. In this way each party contesting a constituency was rendered capable of assembling its own set of returns’ from polling stations and was thus placed in a position to contest the returning officer's arithmetic should it so wish.

We regarded this provision as a most important one, and had suggested it to the Electoral Commission as a corollary of the safe guards agreed between the Military Commission and the DP in respect of an immediate count at all polling stations. The counting procedure thus had its own inbuilt checks and we observed during our visits to the polling stations that these appeared to be working well. No party polling agents made any complaints to us.

133. On the debit side we noted that the form did not provide for a formal reconciliation of used and unused ballot papers with the number of ballot papers received and the votes cast. Further, presiding officers generally either lacked seals or were not aware of the requirements that unused papers should be accounted for and sealed up separately before the count itself commenced.

However, no suggestion of impropriety was made to us in this regard. We would also note that because of the exceptionally high poll the addition of extraneous ballot papers was rendered readily detectable. An additional safeguard lay in the fact that each stamp held by a presiding officer bore a different number.

134. Because of the size of the turnout, the area for malpractice in respect of stuffing ballot boxes or of ballot box substitution was narrowed to a very fine margin, and the likelihood of detection was correspondingly high.

135. For these reasons we are satisfied that the protections ill built in to the counting process were such as to provide adequate safeguards for each of the contesting parties, and to enable them quite independently to establish whether or not any alleged irregularities actually took place.

136. Overall, our impression was that the count passed off without incident and in an orderly fashion. We were, of course unable to be present at more than a significant sample of the counts, but enquiries made of the various parties before we left; did not suggest that the situation had been otherwise where members of our Group were not present.

137. Late on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, we were dismayed to learn of a retrospective Proclamation made by the Chairman of the Military Commission (Annex 4). Although this document amended the electoral law in positive ways so as to legitimise the fact that polling hours had been extended and that the count had taken place at polling stations, the remainder of the Proclamation had the effect of giving to the Chairman of the Military Commission the sole power to announce results as well as the power to declare the poll in individual constituencies to be invalid. Each returning officer was enjoined to communicate the results only to the Chairman of the Military Commission, and to provide him with a confidential report on "various aspects" of the poll. The Proclamation also provided that no decision made by the chairman of the military commission could be challenged in any court of law.