Polls always rigged - Mudge

Republican Party (RP) president Henk Mudge says all national elections since 1989 have been rigged in favour of Swapo.

According to him, this is why the RP won only one parliamentary seat in the 2014 election, arguing that the party then had more card-carrying members in the two Kavango regions than the votes it purportedly got.

“We know what our support is,” he said at the opening of the party's congress on Friday.

Mudge said the RP's court challenge against the 2004 election results could not be followed through to its conclusion because the party had run out of funds.

In 2009 the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) was again taken to court, which led to a recount of the ballot papers.

The RP and other opposition parties also complained to former president Hifikepunye Pohamba over the use of the Indian-manufactured electronic voting machines (EVMs) that were introduced in the 2014 and 2015 elections.

“At that stage already it was proven that that system was unreliable and that the machines could be manipulated. We also complained about the fact that there would be no paper trail,” Mudge said.

He said opposition parties were told that the system could not be changed because the elections were then too close. However, he said, the ECN had promised to incorporate a voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) before the next elections – next month's general election and the local and regional elections next year.

The Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) once again brought up the VVPAT issue with a motion in parliament earlier this year. This motion was referred to the constitutional and legal affairs parliamentary standing committee, but nothing further happened, which Mudge said was yet another delaying tactic.

Mudge said he has since requested the ECN to make one of the machines available to the opposition parties to get experts in to prove – or disprove – that they can be hacked.

The ECN declined this request, presumably because only the manufacturer could provide certain codes. The ECN then announced that it would hold an open day during which opposition parties could bring experts to view the machines, but called that off at the last minute.

Mudge said the RP obtained legal advice that the use of the EVMs was “without any doubt” in contravention of the Electoral Act.

He said opposition parties have a good chance of winning a court case but only four of the 14 parties confirmed their financial support for an urgent application to the High Court.

These parties are the RDP, Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP), Swanu, and the Congress of Democrats (CoD).

“All the other opposition parties for some weird reason decided not to support us and that obviously raised some eyebrows,” Mudge said.

“[The] failure by us to have an urgent application submitted to court in time will result in this upcoming election being rigged again and to be quite honest, all of us can stop campaigning now. There are obviously rumours that Swapo has been in contact with certain opposition parties and that they were promised a certain number of seats.”

Mudge said the ECN would “once again sit behind locked doors for a week, pretending to verify the results, while they are actually manipulating the results and deciding which party will get how many seats”.

“I know it may sound like a conspiracy theory, but past experience has proven that this is what will happen,” Mudge said.

He added: “It was for the sake of saving our democracy and to ensure that the election results will be a true reflection of the will of the people who voted, that we wanted to take the ECN to court and to force them to use ballot papers that we can verify and count ourselves. I challenge all those opposition parties who decided not to participate in the court case to explain to the Namibian people why they were not prepared to support us.”

CATHERINE SASMAN