Zimbabwe's presidential and parliamentary elections were "free, honest and credible", the African Union observer mission's head has said. Olusegun Obasanjo said the incidents reported during Wednesday's poll could not "change the outcome". The largest observer group said earlier the poll was "seriously compromised".
President Robert Mugabe's party is claiming victory in the election, which was rejected as a "huge farce" by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
On Wednesday, voters were choosing a president, 210 lawmakers and local councillors. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has five days to declare who won the poll, reports the BBC. Indications are President Mugabe will sweep to power with a colossal margin as his party scores a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
The absence of cases of violence has thrown MDC-T [Tsvangirai] and its handlers off kilter which is why they precariously hang onto trying to attack the voters' roll as if it is compiled at Zanu-PF headquarters. It should be stated from the outset that the Registrar-General of Voters' Office falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs which was overseen by ministers drawn from Zanu-PF and MDC.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is made up of commissioners chosen from lists submitted by the three parties in Government. People went out in large numbers to put an end to Mugabe's 33-year rule that was characterised by suffering. First official results from national assembly elections show that Mugabe's Zanu-PF party is taking an early lead. However, the seats announced were mostly in Mr Mugabe's rural strongholds, correspondents say.
Zanu-PF spokesman Rugaro Gumbo predicted that Mugabe - who is running for a seventh term - would get at least 70% of the vote in the presidential poll. "We are expecting a landslide victory," he was quoted as saying in Zimbabwe's state-run Herald newspaper.
Zanu-PF and Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have shared an uneasy coalition government since 2009 under a deal brokered to end the deadly violence that erupted after a disputed presidential poll the previous year.
Speaking in the capital Harare on Friday, Obasanjo said the elections were fair and free "from the campaigning point of view". The former Nigerian president admitted that there were "incidents that could have been avoided", but he stressed that the 69 AU observers did not believe those irregularities could change the overall outcome of the poll. His assessment sharply contrasted to that by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) - the largest group of domestic monitors with some 7,000 people on the ground throughout the country.
It said on Thursday that the elections were "seriously compromised", with as many as a million people being unable to cast their ballots. The ZESN said potential voters were much more likely to be turned away from polling stations in urban areas, where support for Tsvangirai is strong, than in President Mugabe's rural strongholds.
The group also alleged significant irregularities before the poll. It said that 99.7% of rural voters were registered on the electoral roll in June compared with only 67.9% of urban voters. But speaking to al-Jazeera, Obasanjo questioned ZESN's conclusions, describing them as "not verifiable".
He said he was satisfied that the apparent anomalies between registration between urban and rural voters mentioned by ZESN had been explained by the registrar-general, who had the accurate figures for birth and death. Obasanjo also said that Tsvangirai's camp should have addressed concerns about the electoral roll before the vote - not after. The AU observer mission's assessment of the elections is a big boost for President Mugabe and a heavy blow for his opponents, the BBC's Andrew Harding in Johannesburg says.
It is unclear now how Tsvangirai intends to fight on, our correspondent adds. On Thursday, the prime minister said the elections were "null and void". "Our conclusion is that this has been a huge farce... It's a sham election that does not reflect the will of the people." Another observer mission - the Southern African Development Community - is expected to give its verdict on the elections later on Friday.
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