By Bridget Johnson, your guide to Journalism

At first glance, when you hear that Zimbabwe is having a presidential election, you just expect stuffed ballot boxes and every other manner of vote-rigging possible. After all, Robert Mugabe has ruled the country — which now has a pathetic life expectancy of 37 years for men and 34 years for women, the lowest in the world, according to the World Health Organization — with an iron fist since its 1980 independence.

There’s little doubt that much of the country is behind the Movement for Democratic Change, considering Mugabe’s mess of 80 percent unemployment, starving people, inflation soaring 150,000 percent, and heinous human rights abuses. But winning at the ballot box is only half the battle. Getting the government to concede defeat is another.

From Time:

“The M.D.C. said it had information that the regime had printed around 3.5 million extra ballot papers, and calculated that the presumed resultant rigging would result in a Mugabe victory. What’s more, the M.D.C. has announced leads in previous elections, only to be reversed by later, regime-official counts. … The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which will collate the vote centrally, has demanded the police arrest those announcing regional results before it announces the national result.”

And it’s never a good sign when those results are very, very delayed:

“…By sundown, as frustrations grew more than 24 hours after polls closed, riot police and other security forces were patrolling the capital’s densely populated suburbs, according to independent election monitors.


In previous elections, partial results have been announced within hours of voting ending.


‘Why are we not getting the results? It’s very clear to me Mugabe wants to steal this election,’ said Hapisson Mate, a 23-year-old first-time voter.


The head of the Pan-African Parliament observer mission warned the delay was creating ‘anxiety’ and warned of a scenario similar to Kenya, where a delayed announcement of results from a disputed December election led to an explosion of violence. More than 1,000 people were killed.”

The MDC said today that candidate Morgan Tsvangirai was leading with 67 percent of the vote based on unofficial results from 35 percent of polling stations (and those are ones located in urban areas). The army remains fiercely loyal to Mugabe, and officials have warned that if Tsvangirai declares victory “it is called a coup d’etat and we all know how coups are handled.”

(Photo by Cate Gillon/Getty Images)