Zimbabwe's opposition accused President Robert Mugabe of rigging the country's election to stay in power despite economic disaster and African observers also said they had detected fraud.As polls closed, Tsvangirai's MDC party said their voters and officials had been turned away from polling stations and erasable voting ink was used to enable fraud by government supporters. Combined with inflated voter rolls and the printing of 3 million surplus ballot papers, this "ensures that there will be multiple voting," said MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti.
Observers from the Pan-African parliament said in a letter to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission that they had found more than 8,000 non-existent people registered on a piece of empty land in a Harare constituency. Biti said the MDC had also found "ghost voters" in Harare.