By Peter Greste
BBC News, Johannesburg
The "verification process" for Zimbabwe's presidential election is, at long last, formally under way.
At around 1400 local time, agents for the four candidates who contested last month's poll gathered at the offices of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) for a process that, in theory, could stretch out for days, weeks or even longer.
It has taken the ZEC more than a month to get to this stage.
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Given the way the commission chairman says the process for the presidential vote is to proceed, still further delays appear imminent.
According to the chairman George Chiweshe, under an agreement reached before the elections, the presidential candidates were expected to present their own tally of results at the verification meeting.
"They do their own tallies, and we do ours; then we get together to compare the results," he told the AFP news agency.
"Where we don't agree, we will pull out every relevant document to ensure we have the same figures. Once we agree, then we check out our additions… and at some stage we have to agree."
Greater transparency
It is impossible to say exactly how long that may take, if ever.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change insists its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the presidential election outright, and by a comfortable margin.
It has based its figures on a sample of results posted outside every polling station on the day of the vote.
The requirement to post those results has been the single most important change to Zimbabwe's elections.
It both dramatically increased the level of transparency compared to previous polls, and became the source of most of the disputes.
But according to the MDC, it is all the evidence they and the electoral authorities needed to proclaim victory.
"The question of a run-off vote doesn't arise," declared the party's Secretary General Tendai Biti at a recent news conference.
"We won outright. The people have spoken."
But the ruling Zanu-PF party has been hinting for weeks that Mr Tsvangirai failed to cross the 50% threshold to avoid a run-off against President Robert Mugabe, and on Wednesday evening, news agencies quoted government sources as saying that was indeed the case.
Those claims have been supported by the independent watchdog, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, which compiled its own tallies, and concluded that Morgan Tsvangirai has probably won about 49.3% - less than 50%, but still within the margin of error, so an outright win is still theoretically possible.
Delays 'contrived'
Whatever the case, the MDC fears that the true figures may never be known.
It believes the electoral commission has contrived the delays to give Zanu-PF time to massage the results, force a run-off, and win the second round through a combination of intimidation and ballot-stuffing.
Another independent watchdog, the South African based pro-democracy think-tank, IDASA, recently compiled a report entitled "The Inconvenient Truth: A complete guide to the delay in releasing the results of Zimbabwe's presidential poll".
In it, the organisation said the "verification process" as defined in the electoral law only involves confirming that the results of the count conducted at polling stations were accurately conveyed to the electoral commission's headquarters.
It does not mean challenging the accuracy of the count in the first place.
So in theory, it ought to be relatively quick and straight forward.
But the fact that the entire process for the parliamentary poll, (including counting, recounting, verification and collation,) has taken almost five weeks, suggests that it may be anything but straight forward.
(BBC)
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