I’m going to start this off by putting this article in the reverse way that it was written.

International human rights organizations and such other groups as the European Union, which on Wednesday called the election “phony,” say the outcome is unlikely to reflect the will of most Zimbabweans. Mugabe controls every daily newspaper, all broadcasting, thousands of patronage jobs, the electoral commission, the courts that would judge accusations of rigging and the dwindling food reserves for a populace on the brink of starvation.

Most international election observers have been kept away. And Mugabe increased the budget of his secret police force by six times in advance of the vote.
…
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe — Two weeks ago, Mike Sibanda strode down the dingy streets of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city with a swagger, chest out, shoulders rolling, a broad, wise-guy smile on his face. The image exuded a single message: I’m nobody’s fool.

So when the subject of Thursday’s national election came up, Sibanda, 24 and long attracted to opposition politics, swiped his right hand in the air and said dismissively, “Ah, it’s useless.” That week, as opposition activists braved possible arrests by gathering for a nighttime rally at a suburban park near here, Sibanda gathered instead with friends to drink beer.

But as the national parliamentary election has drawn nearer, his interest in voting against the ruling party of President Robert Mugabe — in power since before Sibanda was born — has returned. Sibanda has found his faith in democracy rekindled by what he calls growing tolerance of dissent and reduced threat of violence.

Mugabe’s camp still uses such rough tactics as withholding food from villagers who support the opposition, human rights workers say. And there have been dozens of arrests for participating in such political activity as candidate-voter meetings or hanging campaign signs.

But in the face of strong international pressure, Mugabe is seeking to convince the world that he can stage a fair election, analysts here say. The violent tactics of recent elections, such as beatings, torture and murder by government supporters, have declined, according to human rights workers. The government has also eased restrictions on access to airwaves, though they are still dominated by Mugabe’s message that members of the opposition are traitors who want to reestablish Zimbabwe as a British colony.

With these small steps toward fairness, attendance at campaign rallies is at the highest level in the five-year history of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

“There’s a possibility for them to win now. There’s hope,” said Sibanda, who joined throngs at a soccer stadium on Saturday to cheer the opposition. “There’s no reason to be scared.”

Despite everything, there’s always hope. Zimbabwe is one of Condoleezza Rice’s “Outposts of Tyranny,” and Mugabe’s ousting from power would certainly be one of the biggest human rights achievements of our new millenium.

Check out this post from Norm Geras, who received a letter from Zimbabwe. There’s no permalink, but blogger and Zimbabwean Cathy Buckle has a post up regarding her hopes and fears as the election approaches. Here is an excerpt:

It does not matter how polite Zane PF are in this election campaign, how bright and white their T shirts are or how they crow incessantly on the radio that Zimbabwe is now a mature democracy, the fact of the matter is we are tired and abosultely fed up of living like this. When we vote on Thursday it will be for food, clean water, affordable schools for our children, hospitals which have drugs and leaders who will respect us and our universal rights of speech, movement and association. I have a picture in my head of a man on a horse trailing a yellow banner in the middle of this weeks revolution in Kyrgyzstan. That image from the other side of the world in a country whose name I cannot even pronounce, gives me hope.

Polls are just now opening.

Hundreds of voters braved early morning drizzle to queue hours before voting started at some stations. Polls opened in the capital Harare on time at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT).

“We have come to make a statement,” said one young man, grinning as he headed toward a polling station in the city.

There was no visible police presence in the center of Harare but witnesses said there were some patrols in outlying townships where there have been anti-government protests in the past.

Veteran Mugabe, 81, told loyalists of his ZANU-PF party on Wednesday that the poll would be fair and urged voters to reject the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which he calls a puppet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Here is another good article with loads of background and history.

The results of the vote will be announced 48 hours, just enough time for the ballot to be falsified. Mugabe is looking for a 2/3 majority in the parliament which will give him the power to both amend the constitution and appoint his successor — God forbid.

While everything is going on, let’s take a look at some of the dirty tricks underway. China has supplied Mugabe with a high powered radio jammer.

CHINA supplied Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s autocratic president, with a military-strength radio jammer to block opposition broadcasts ahead of today’s poll in the country, diplomatic sources confirmed.
The jammer has been operating from a base outside Harare, the capital, for several weeks to prevent candidates for the Movement for Democratic Change, the main alternative party to the ruling Zanu-PF, from putting their policies across on the airwaves in a state where radio is the only method of mass communication.
It has also blocked broadcasts by the Short Wave Radio Africa station, the population’s main source of independent and uncensored news from outside Zimbabwe.

The MDC was originally formed a labor union party, capturing much of the urban vote. Mugabe is trying to make an inroad to this by increasing wages by 900%.

The government has come up with another panic measure – this time to buy the urban vote. Today, domestic workers???????? salaries and wages were increased across the board by a staggering average of 900% backdated to 1st March, 2005.

Does the illegitimate and bankrupt regime really believe that domestic workers are stupid enough to change their allegiance over this last resort measure?

The urban masses know that the economy is in a state of collapse, they know how useless the Zimbabwe dollar is, they understand fundamental basic economics ???????? put wages up, inflation increases, salaries still worth nothing!

Government election observers are also turning away opposition observers, citing an act that doesn’t exist.

Today was the day to deploy all Election Agents (in previous elections known as Polling Agents) to the 8500 polling stations located in 120 constituencies.

At Victoria Falls this afternoon, the MDC candidate????????s appointed Election Agents were turned away. The reason given was that they could not produce an affidavit that they had signed the ???????Declaration of Secrecy??????? as prescribed by the ???????Electoral Secrecy Act???????.

THERE IS NO SUCH ACT!

At several other polling stations, particularly in the rural areas, Election Agents were turned away because they could not produce a hard copy of the advertisement posted in the press to announce their names. These adverts were timeously published in a local newspaper, the Presiding Officer was simply up to dirty tricks.

Ironically, zanupf failed to honour the regulation set out in the Electoral Act that stipulates advertisement of the Election Agents be published at least three days before voting day.

Withholding food for votes has been a longtime tactic of the Mugabe regime, but this year it may just backfire.

Zhulube – Hundreds of bags of cornmeal were stacked in front of a bar near here this month, rising as high as its roof. The only problem for the hungry people of this drought-stricken area was that the food, like the bar, was controlled by officials from the ruling party. With a crucial election nearing, they weren’t about to give it to just anyone. The officials first held a rally by their impressive mound of food, witnesses here said. The next day, as hundreds of people from surrounding villages gathered to collect the 110-pound bags they had ordered and paid for months before, ruling party officials announced that only their supporters were eligible. When the names of opposition voters were called, they were simply handed back their money, according to several people who were turned away. The leftover bags went on sale hours later for twice the price. Human rights reports say withholding food from opponents is nothing new for the Zanu PF, the party of President Robert Mugabe. But this year, the threat of starvation is creating a potentially potent backlash against Zanu PF.

Many people in this tiny, impoverished village in southern Zimbabwe say that their votes in Thursday’s national parliamentary elections will be based less on their immediate food needs than on which party offers the best chance to reverse Zimbabwe’s five-year-old economic decline and end recurrent food shortages. Opposition party leaders say the issue might represent their best chance to make inroads into Mugabe’s traditionally strong rural support. Among those who went home empty-handed here on March 19 was Thenji Matema, 48, a lean and soft-spoken widow supporting a daughter and four grandchildren on the roughly $25 she earns each month selling mats that she weaves by hand. Matema said she walked away furious and doubly determined to vote for the opposition — even if she has to drink tea to curb her hunger before her one daily meal, and serve meat to her family only once a week. “It’s better I suffer than vote for Zanu PF,” Matema said. She later elaborated on her distaste for the ruling party. It is not only its role in mismanaging the food situation, she said, but “that they are forcing people to do what they want. People don’t like that.”

The U.S. and the EU have thoroughly denounce Mugabe, and I have to commend the media for giving it good coverage. Want to see something possibly more deranged than withholding food? How about this.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is campaigning across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe accompanied by three Air Force helicopters packed with more than 100 million US dollars worth of state-of-the-art Hewlett Packard laptop computers.

Depending on the size of the community, the president doles out between ten and one hundred computers at each stop on the election trail.

Schools are the main beneficiaries – many of which have been without electricity, textbooks and even roofs for many years.

The money to buy the computers – enough to have imported nearly a million tonnes of staple maize for a country experiencing widespread crop failure and hunger – and to fuel the helicopters has come from state coffers in a clear violation of electoral rules forbidding competing parties from using government funds to contest elections.

And up to one million ghost voters could throw the election Mugabe’s way.

But what if the MDC actually wins? It’s a longshot, and they have huge problems to remedy that have diseased Zimbabwe for decades now. It’s unlikely that Mugabe will win the south, but then again, he is rigging the elections. If 2/3 is what he wants, 2/3 is what he’ll try to get by any means possible.

The blog Sokwanele had another great post regarding lack of turnout among the armed forces.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission opened the postal ballot to all civil servants working outside the country as well as the local army and police. Those in the armed forces within the country were also allowed to choose to vote by postal ballot or to go to their own registered polling station on the 31st March.

That ballot has already closed, all ballot papers have been submitted to the relevant Constituencies, to be opened at the end of the voting process and added to the local votes.

A mere 9500 postal ballots have been submitted. This means the armed forces have already decided to say ???????Enough is enough??????? and refused to vote in the presence of their commanding officers.

All activists working in the name of democracy would like to congratulate the armed forces for joining them in their quest for freedom!

Are the opposition leaders planning a protest? Some of them have certainly suggested it, though they are being tight-lipped.

A Zimbabwean opposition leader yesterday raised the prospect of “mass mobilisation” in the event of government fraud in today’s parliamentary election, and ruled out resorting to the courts, as the opposition did in 2000 and 2002.

Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition party, declined to be specific on the party’s plans should it wish to challenge the results of the widely criticised poll.

However, Mr Ncube said: “What we can say is that we won’t go to court – that strategy proved futile and useless.” He added: “These are political issues that could only be solved through mass mobilisation of people.”

The MDC will face President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in the election, which is under intense international scrutiny.

Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC president, and Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, have both warned of an angry public response to perceived voter fraud. However, the MDC has no history of successful mass street protests, and few in Zimbabwe expect a response to a rigged poll on the scale of the “people’s power” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

Zanu-PF is predicting victory in today’s vote. It hopes to secure a two-thirds vote that would marginalise the MDC, one of Africa’s best- organised opposition parties.

But the MDC, despite protesting over what it says were unfair pre-vote conditions, says it expects to add several mostly rural seats to its 57 seats in Zimbabwe’s 150-seat parliament.

After threatening to boycott the vote, the party appears to have caught Zanu-PF off-guard by staging a spirited and efficient campaign, extending its party structures deep into ruling-party strongholds. It has drawn crowds of up to 20,000 at its rallies, compared with fewer than 5,000 at President Mugabe’s final rally in a Harare suburb yesterday.

Here’s a picture from the voting lines (don’t expect any protest babes):

UPDATE: We have our first candidate missing.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (Reuters) – The opposition MDC said one of its candidates had disappeared in the south of Zimbabwe after an attack by government supporters on the eve of Thursday’s parliamentary election.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which is battling President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the parliamentary poll, said Siyabonga Malandu, of Isinza constituency in Matabeleland Province, disappeared on Wednesday night.

“He last contacted us at around 7 p.m. last night saying they were under attack. He said ZANU-PF have started beating up people,” MDC Secretary-General Welshman Ncube told Reuters. “Up to now we have had no contact from him.”

Police in the capital, Harare, said they had not yet received any report on the incident but would look into it.

Young, angry — and voting.

UPDATE: Quote of the day!

“The moment M.D.C. was able to campaign without violence in place, it gave people courage,” he said. “It’s like being let out – you release the cows in spring, and there’s all this fresh grass, and the cows just go crazy.”

Another good note: “MDC spokesman Nkanyiso Mageda also says he has little faith in international observers in reporting the problems. He says many of them have already announced that the elections will be free and fair, while others stay in comfortable hotels in the cities ???????? far away from the more vulnerable rural areas.”

Keep checking Sokwanele for more updates on regional conditions. we won’t know the results until at least Friday so just enjoy the ride until then.