Riot police Saturday clashed with voters angered by huge polling station queues in Zimbabwe's election, which the opposition charged were a deliberate tactic to prevent their supporters voting. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, President Robert Mugabe's toughest challenger since independence from Britain in 1980, accused him with wholesale cheating and called for voting to be extended by two days after Sunday's scheduled finish. At least 12 people were injured when police used teargas, rubber bullets and whips on a crowd at a polling station in Harare's western township of Kuwadzana, witnesses said.
Hmmm... The way the rules read, if you're not a member of ZANU/PF your polling place is in Uraguay. And you have to produce your granddaddy to vouch for your identity. And the ballot's printed in Finnish.The voting has gone fairly smoothly so far, and the government are even talking about extending the voting deadline.
It is however bloody slow, and we've got a lot of silly rules to blame for most of that. However, if you've been to Africa you'd know that the mixture of English informality and African efficiency can make for a lethal combination. In my opinion this is also a major factor to the speed of voting. One interesting stastic is that there are now (I think for the first time) more registered urban voters than rural voters, showing that the voting rules are not impenetrable.
Posted by Emmanuel Goldstein [www.airstripone.blogspot.com] 3/10/2002 6:44:03 AM |