Podcast transcript
Five Cents looks at What Makes An Election Credible through Zambia’s disputed count: the suspension after attacks on officials, the missing or stolen ballots, and the evidence institutions need to earn public trust.
The answer lies less in a single announcement than in whether every step can be checked.
A credible election is not one with no problems. In large elections, mistakes, delays, violence, and logistical failures can happen. Credibility depends on what follows: whether the problem is identified, documented, corrected where possible, and open to independent review.
That means an election result needs a traceable chain. Votes are counted at polling stations. Officials complete result forms. Party agents should receive copies. Materials move to constituency centres, where totals are verified, then onward to the national system.
If the figures at each stage match the records held by candidates, observers, and the electoral authority, a losing side may still be unhappy. But it has a basis to challenge specific problems through evidence.
Zambia now provides a sharp test of that principle. Voters went to the polls on August 13 to elect a president, lawmakers, and local representatives.
The Electoral Commission of Zambia later suspended counting after reporting attacks on polling staff and the theft of marked ballot papers from some boxes. Counting resumed hours later with increased security.
That does not, by itself, prove the national result was compromised. Nor does it make the interruption unimportant.
The question is precise: which polling stations were affected, what exactly was taken or damaged, and how were those results handled afterwards?
The commission needs to show when the process stopped and restarted, whether affected materials were isolated, whether recounts were ordered, and whether party agents and observers could watch the resumed work.
It should also make polling-station and constituency results available in a form that can be compared with the national total.
A pause that is fully explained can be a safeguard. A pause that remains opaque becomes a gap in the audit trail.
The main actors have different responsibilities. The Electoral Commission controls the formal results chain. For the presidential vote, its chair declares the winner once the legal threshold is met.
Police must protect officials, voters, and election materials, while investigating the reported violence and one death at a polling station.
Their conduct matters as much as their presence. Security that appears even-handed can reduce tensions. Selective enforcement can deepen them.
President Hakainde Hichilema has called for calm while seeking a second term. His government rejects opposition claims that democratic space has narrowed.
The main challenger, Brian Mundubile of the Tonse Alliance, faces a consequential choice too. He can press claims through polling-station forms, witness accounts, formal complaints, and court petitions. Or political leaders can make broad allegations before the evidence has been tested.
The first route does not guarantee acceptance of the outcome, but it gives the dispute a constitutional path.
Observers also matter, though they do not choose the winner. International and domestic monitoring groups can separate what they directly saw from complaints made by parties.
Their most useful contribution is to judge whether incidents were isolated or systematic, whether agents had access to the count, and whether the response met legal standards.
Their findings should not be treated as a substitute for courts. But they can help the public distinguish evidence from assertion.
Zambia’s courts are the final institutional backstop. A presidential petition can be filed within seven days after a president-elect is declared, and the Constitutional Court must decide it within fourteen days.
The court can uphold the election or nullify it. But a legal challenge is only as strong as the records behind it: result forms, seals, chain-of-custody evidence, testimony, and proof that an irregularity was serious enough to affect the outcome.
This is why the immediate danger is not necessarily nationwide collapse. Counting restarted, observers are present, and there is a defined legal route.
Zambia also has recent experience of a peaceful transfer of power, when Hichilema defeated the incumbent in 2021. But past stability does not settle a current dispute.
What would contain it now is straightforward, even if carrying it out is difficult.
The electoral commission should publish a detailed incident account. Police should investigate attacks and theft without regard to political affiliation. Parties should preserve their records and make specific claims. And courts should be accessible, prompt, and visibly independent.
The opposite pattern would be damaging: results with no station-level documentation, unexplained missing ballots, restrictions on agents or observers, selective arrests, or political denials where evidence is required.
A result can be numerically plausible and still lose legitimacy if voters cannot see how it was produced.
The broader lesson is that credibility comes from traceability, impartial enforcement, and a real remedy when something goes wrong.
Zambia’s count will be judged not only by who wins, but by whether institutions can turn allegations into verifiable facts.
To explore this further, you can generate Five Cents episodes on Zambia’s Constitutional Court and election petitions, or How Election Results Are Audited.
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