Zimbabwe elections, mostly peaceful, bring voters out in droves

In a preliminary assessment released a day after the vote, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network said the count at polling stations was going smoothly. But it reported that some voters had been turned away at 6 percent of polling stations nationwide, and at 19 percent in Harare, an opposition stronghold.

There were also “incidents of intimidation, harassment or violence” in a limited number of polling stations, according to the network, a private Zimbabwean organization that deployed 6,500 observers across the country.

Andrew Makoni, the network’s chairman, said it was too soon to say whether the problems resulted from logistical issues or from fraud.

“We are in the process of collating all those reports to really be in a position to assess the nature of the irregularities,” he said.

The voting was free of the widespread rigging and violence that marred previous elections under Mugabe, who was ousted in November after more than 37 years in power. But the main opposition party immediately questioned the validity of the poll and, if the race for president proves very close, those doubts are sure to intensify.

In the race for the presidency, both the governing party candidate, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, and his main rival, Nelson Chamisa, expressed confidence in victory Tuesday, though no vote tallies had been made public. Election officials said results of the contest would be announced by Saturday, or within five days of the vote, as required by law; if no one wins over 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held in early September.

The presidential race had been considered too close to call. Mnangagwa, 75, the incumbent who seized power from Mugabe and is the candidate of the ruling ZANU-PF party, is hoping that a win in a free and fair elections would bring him personal legitimacy and economic assistance for Zimbabwe from the West.

For decades, Mnangagwa acted as Mugabe’s enforcer and played a leading role in rigging past elections. But as president, he has differentiated himself from his predecessor by reaching out to Western officials and investors, especially the British, as well as to white Zimbabweans.

The main opposition candidate, Chamisa, 40, outmaneuvered older and more experienced rivals to win the leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance after the death this year of its longtime leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who ran twice against Mugabe. A skilled orator, Chamisa, who is also a pastor, energized supporters at scores of rallies across Zimbabwe in recent months.

Chamisa has made statements casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral process. A couple of days before the vote, he said a victory by Mnangagwa would be “fiction” — even though a poll by Afrobarometer, a nonpartisan research organization, had shown him slightly behind Mnangagwa.

In a tweet Monday, Chamisa accused election officials of causing delays to suppress the vote in the opposition’s urban strongholds. “The people’s will being negated and undermined due to these deliberate and unnecessary delays,” he wrote, though he offered no evidence.

At a news conference Tuesday, Priscilla Chigumba, the chairwoman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, denied that officials had deliberately caused delays. Despite Chamisa’s tweet, she also said the commission had not received any complaints of fraud from any candidate.

Election officials were poised to announce results in some local races by Tuesday evening.

Observers from the European Union and the United States were expected to release their assessments of the elections Wednesday.

On Monday, international observers said the voting appeared to have proceeded peacefully nationwide. But they also said that there had been reports from many polling stations where voters had failed to cast a ballot — some because their names had not been registered and others because the process was taking hours.

The refusal of election officials to post voter rolls at the entrance of polling stations, as requested by the opposition and observers, appeared to have exacerbated those problems.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Zimbabwe elections, mostly peaceful, bring voters out in droves

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Huge numbers of Zimbabweans turned out for the first elections since the fall of the longtime ruler Robert Mugabe, in voting that was largely peaceful, though marked by problems in the capital, Harare, election observers said Tuesday.

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