The ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) of President Robert Mugabe won the elections with an increased majority against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
"The distorted nature of the pre-election playing field and the failure to address core democratic deficits precluded a free and fair election."
[4] The Registrar General refused to release the roll in electronic form, supported by judgments from the Supreme Court, necessitating any analysis to work from a paper copy.
In February, South African president Thabo Mbeki conceded that Zimbabwe's voters roll was defective and needed to be looked at.
The main parties participating were: Zanu-PF is using claimed interference of Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and United States president George W. Bush in Zimbabwean politics, as an election issue.
The MDC sees the main issues as being jobs, food, peace, affordable AIDS drugs and honest, competent emphatic leadership.
They considered that voters would be safer polling on the same day as the rest of the country, where a delay would allow Zanu-PF to concentrate efforts in that district.
Roy Bennett's application for release before the elections, on the basis of good behaviour and dissolution of the parliament that ordered the incarceration, failed.
[10] Sikhumbuzo Ndiweni, a former ZANU PF Bulawayo Provincial Information and Publicity Secretary, is co-ordinating the Independent Candidates Solidarity Network.
On 8 March at Betura village, ward 16, more than 2 000 people were denied access to buy grain for allegedly failing to produce the badges.
By 4 February, an SADC team tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that Zimbabwe complies with the regional protocol had yet to receive permission to visit.
The Commission made a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe in June 2002, and the Union's findings and recommendations were adopted in January 2005, at its summit in Abuja.
Aziz Pahad, deputy foreign minister for South Africa, said the country has been invited to observe the Zimbabwean poll in at least five different capacities.
Five members of South Africa's governing African National Congress party arrived in Harare on 10 March headed by James Motlatsi, the first foreign observers.
In response, George Bizos, a respected human rights lawyer, said that all Southern African Development Community members are allowed to enter Zimbabwe without applying for a visa.
[27] After a meeting the next day between the unions in South Africa Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said "It is quite clear at the moment as things stand that there cannot be free and fair elections".
ZCTU requested that an independent electoral commission be established and international observers be allowed in the country, and the government also needed to scrap strict laws restricting the opposition's access to the media and barring it from holding public rallies and meetings without police permission.
Mlambo Ngcuka said the observer mission had asked the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to provide evidence to support their claims of discrepancies in 32 of the 120 constituencies.
The MDC won virtually all the seats in the main cities, Harare and Bulawayo, where civil society organisations are relatively strong and able to prevent electoral manipulation.
The MDC also won a majority of seats in the southern region of Matabeleland, where the Ndebele people, once supporters of Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU, continue to oppose the Shona-dominated ZANU-PF.
In some notable local results, Emmerson Mnangagwa, speaker of the previous parliament, and tipped at one time to succeed Mugabe but recently fallen from grace, lost his seat Kwe-kwe to the MDC's Blessing Chebundo.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, which had some 6,000 observers in the 8,000 polling stations, says that some 10% of would-be voters were turned away, either because their names were not on the electoral roll, they did not have the right identity papers, or they were in the wrong constituency.