S.Africa: A black man told me of the 1994 election rigging…

Original Post Date: 2003-12-09  Posted By: Jan

From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 12/9/2003 3:11:29 PM
S.Africa: A black man told me of the 1994 election rigging…

There is a story I’d like to tell of the 1994 rigged election which former President De Klerk finally admitted to publicly.

I had long suspected the 1994 election was manipulated. At the time there was mention of the million votes, the neatly stacked papers and many other election irregularities.

But there is something I’d like to mention. In 1997-1998, I was doing consulting work for a company in Johannesburg – a rather prominent company. I was working in the IT (Computer) department.

I befriended a rather interesting black programmer. However, I realised he was very pro-ANC. So I never discussed politics with him because I did not want to end up arguing with him over it.

However, one day we were chatting and he brought up politics. Wishing to avoid a confrontation with him, I side-stepped it by saying “In politics, things are not always what they seem.”

He responded back by saying “Yes, what you say is true.”

Then he launched into a most fascinating story which I cannot verify. But this is what he told me: He said to me that he had a friend, a black guy, who had fled South Africa during Apartheid, and had lived in Canada. While in Canada he had studied for his BSC in Computer Science. He had then returned to SA when the ANC was unbanned and had worked for them.

This friend told him that during the 1994 elections, he had been at the computer centre where all the votes are collated from all the polling stations. This friend said that the votes were then manipulated by computer according to a pre-determined secret agreement between the ANC and the National Party. His friend claimed, that they gave the Zulus more votes than they actually had in order to appease them.

I don’t know what to make of this story. At one time I took it quite seriously. He was a serious kind of guy. But it could all be bunk. And I am tempted to think like that to a degree these days. If the voting was rigged by computer, then why bother rigging individual ballots?

Nevertheless, this is what I was told in all seriousness by this black programmer. Exactly how much truth is in it, I can’t imagine. But it does nevertheless make me wonder.

I have toyed many times with the thought of how possible it could be to rig the computer side of an election. Being a computer programmer myself, I know its possible in theory. In fact, nothing can lie better than a computer. So the possibility has an academic interest for me in that sense.

What could add to that line of thinking was that I noticed in both the elections in SA and the rigged ones in Zimbabwe – that at first, the party that ultimately wins actually doesn’t do so well. But towards the end, of the counting (which happens to be days over here), the party that wins, suddenly gets a higher portion of the votes. And I always wondered if this was a sign of vote rigging by computer. In other words: They see what the votes are like as they come in, and if it does not suit them, then at the end, they “make adjustments” and then recalculate figures, and then suddenly the party wins. During the elections one hears of such terms being used. But I never sat down to study it thoroughly enough, or to collect enough evidence to prove my theory that one can rig the voting by manipulating the final collated statistics on computer. Yet, to this day, I wonder if it is possible, and whether what this black programmer told me could have any truth in it? Tantalising eh?

Jan Lamprecht

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