This article caught my eye just before I went to hit the bed. Very sneaky. Very smart.

Observer teams from African countries and regional organisations have been unanimous in declaring the elections free and fair, but the US embassy said that although the Zimbabwe government had not invited it to send observer teams from abroad, it had sent 25 of its Harare-based diplomats to observe the process in almost half of the 120 constituencies.

Their reports showed “several patterns of irregularities” – the exclusion of observers from four polling stations, the failure to publish the results of each polling station as stated in electoral law, the participation of uniformed police in the compilation of results, and the use of radios and telephones by police personnel to transmit results to government officials.

Some polling agents and observers had been prevented from witnessing the count, while polling agents had had their notes confiscated by policemen and officials. The embassy said the number of potential voters not allowed to vote by officials was as high as 30 per cent in some cases.

It also criticised the failure of the state-run Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to publish details of the voting in four out of the 10 provinces and queried discrepancies between the figures compiled by the commission and those subsequently published.