Presidential Election: the Special Electoral Court will have it heads or tails

The first decisions taken by the Special Electoral Court concerning Madagascar’s presidential election’s round two hint no major change to be affecting the current stand, since no presidential finalist candidate has yet been disqualified. Each candidate has actually requested the other one to be disqualification. Both demands have been rejected. The Electoral Commission may have awarded Hery Rajaonarimampianina with 53.50 % of the votes and victory, but nothing is to be held as a done deal yet. Jean Louis Robinson sticks to his own victory by 52.87 % of the votes according to the electoral reports mustered by his staff and denounces massive frauds perpetrated by the ruling power for its candidate’ sake.

Will the Special Electoral Court ever take an outright move on and proceed to a comparison of electoral reports? And eventually bust the scheme and come to a result contradicting the Electoral Commission’s issued result? The Electoral Commission had revealed some problems which prompted it to invalidate a handful of votes. This symbolic gesture is far from satisfactory to Jean Louis Robinson and his staff, which reported evidences of massive frauds more particularly perpetrated in rural areas and coastal regions. “Behind your 70% , there ain’t no truth ,” surged the Ravalomanana sphere’s champion.

The frauds would have been perpetrated only where conditions were suited, and the risks to get busted, minimal. Neither the Electoral Commission nor the international and domestic observers actually are capable of stand up against them. Beatrice Atallah consistently blames malfunctioning voting process and Fokontany officials who served in polling stations. Whenever a polling station’s leading official refrains from drawing electoral reports up, or sealing major documents, many things may well go off course from the very next day on.

Physical evidences of these faked electoral reports have to be provided with. The missing number of ballots related issue recovers the stage. Several polling stations did not receive their due number of ballots in due time, and electoral commission officials may expect to find it hard to take their way out of this. Besides, Jean Louis Robinson and his staff point at reports of so-said average turnout, around 50 %, although barely one voter out of 10 actually joined the fokontany on D-day.

Pressure was definitely mounting high on fokontany chiefs, was it not? They happened to be threatened of sudden wage shortages in retaliation, could the ruling power’s candidate fail to secure a large victory. Ghost voters in the electoral list recovered flesh and blood and dwelled among the livings on D-day to cast votes. As a recall, Jean Louis Robinson, his staff and its allies suspect the ruling power of having conducted demography manipulations, and inserted 400,000 additional fictional voters. The Electoral Commission’s check up was incomplete, the doubles hunt failed to be outright. The Commission was overcome by faked reports and tampered hardware. In any case, the sudden mass production of national identification cards in the name of these voters is more than dubious.

Not to mention that Hery Rajaonarimampianina is a recidivist. The conclusion of the first presidential electoral round revealed his condemnation to symbolic sanction of 5000 invalidated voices. Any eventual victory required 100 times more contentious votes. The Special Electoral Court will have to react to this outbreak of outdated malevolent practices. Still, the Special Electoral Court engages on a path which raises concerns: the spotted issues are not capable of dramatically upsetting the released electoral results.

Madagascar’s electoral integrity ratings are not likely to get a boost this time around. Then, once again, this Special Electoral Court would not dare stripping Hery Rajaonarimampianina from 400 000 votes at once and award them to Jean Louis Robinson, no matter how relevant the evidences of wrongdoing might be. The Special Electoral Court is somehow trapped between a hammer and a hard place: it has to reckon with a pending crisis similar to what developed in the Ivory Coast if it turns against the Electoral Commission; but if it ever goes along with faked results, the crisis looming ahead will be that which developed in Madagascar in 2002.