Excessive secrecy has always compromised the integrity of Mozambique’s
elections. The National Elections Commission secretly changes results with
no records kept nor any public notice that changes have been made. The
official final results of the 2019 elections were changed three times by the
Constitutional Council with no comment and identical document numbers.
The political parties want a politicised electoral machine with party nominees
to all electoral bodies, and integrity has steadily declined. By 2018–9 elections
had become dominated by the ruling party, Frelimo, which was able to openly
change the outcome of municipal elections and create 329 430 ghost voters
in the national elections. Civil society observers had become an important
check on elections; but in 2019, independent observation was blocked in
several provinces and the head of civil society observation in one province
was assassinated by a police hit squad. The judiciary, which ordered a rerun
in one town in the 2013 municipal elections, has become politicised and will
no longer intervene. This paper is an empirical account of those events.