With only hours to the swearing in of President Yoweri Museveni, who was handed the fifth term in office last February, his main challenger Col. Dr Kizza Besigye has taken to social media and spilled what he calls convincing statistical evidence that the election was gravely interfered with in favor of the incumbent.
Besigye claims he won the presidential election with 52% but was declared runner up by the Independent Electoral Commission under Chairman Eng. Badru Kiggundu, with a minor 35%.
The opposition FDC candidate is pushing for an internationally steered independent audit of the results of the February elections, which government has declined citing national sovereignty.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday morning, Besigye unveiled what appears to be his party-sponsored expert analysis of the election process and results, indicating a number of loopholes.
The evidence he said, shows that substantial election fraud occurred and it changed the outcome of the polls, having been subjected by the experts to four different tests.
The first test on the tallies, he says, captured patterns in vote entry, which could only prove human interference in the tallying.
“When humans make up ‘random’ numbers (for instance by entering false tallies), patterns emerge. People tend to choose numbers with higher digits,” he tweeted.
“The February 2016 tallies have too many 4, 5, 6s, and not enough 0s and 1s. This indicates human interference not expected in fair election. The probability of observing these differences in a fair election is extremely small (only 2 in 100,000).
He added, “Patterns of the last digit in polling station tallies by district also tell a story – a uniform pattern of all digits is expected. A simple but powerful test showed 4 times expected number of districts had “suspicious” patterns – EVIDENCE of fraud.”
Meanwhile another test Besigye says, captured loopholes in the fingerprints, creating a picture of electoral fraud by examining voter turnout. Most fingerprints he says were found to me rather “smeared” than stuck on the papers as pictured below.
Besigye also tables “incremental evidence” which calls into question the validity of over 3million votes – a massive margin enough to change the outcome of the election.
The FDC findings show that the 2016 elections was fraudulent with 68% of the districts affected by incremental fraud and the nature of the fraud being driven by “vote manufacturing,” more than stealing from the opposition.
He says, “It is likely that vote manipulation was sufficient enough to swing the result of the election with more than two thirds of the districts affected.
“These tests together with other evidence – intimidation, teargas, violence, national ID registry – cast serious doubt on the election. “
Most of Besigye’s points about the shortfalls in the 2016 election were raised before the Supreme Court by his fellow contender Amama Mbabazi, but the 9 judges unanimously agreed that the evidence was insufficient to warrant cancelation of results.
Besigye believes this was expected of the court: “We live under dictatorship: judges and courts serve at the will of the state. History shows that the Supreme Court is very reluctant to rule against President Museveni. In 2001 and 2006 election petitions, the Supreme Court judges publically acknowledged extensive fraud but did NOT nullify the election.”
Besigye remains insistent on an international audit of the February election results as was the case Kosovo, Afghanistan and Haiti.
“If Mr. Museveni legitimately and irrefutably won this election, then why would he not support an audit?,” he wondered.
EC Responds
The spokesperson of the Independent Electoral Commission Mr Jotham Taremwa when reached on these assertions, said he had not yet seen them on social media.
Taremwa however, said that Besigye had picked the wrong time to raise them to the public, after letting the window for him to legally challenge them close.
“What he is doing now doesn’t help,” said the EC mouthpiece. “We had the election way back in February; why did it take him so long to raise these issues in the right channels. He probably was busy cooking up all this purported analysis.”