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Winning an election means in most countries getting more votes than anyone else, a fairly simple concept that even small children can understand when they vote for alternatives to spending a Saturday afternoon.
The Zimbabwean opposition and some of those who support it outside the country, often with practical financial support, does not see it this way.
It assumes it must have won and thus forced to assume that coming second means that the vote was rigged in some way.
This is despite the large array of measures open in the Electoral Act, from every candidate allowed an agent at every polling station, and being present in the count, upwards, along with everyone entitled to check the voters roll to ensure that they are on it, with access to print and read-only versions of the voters roll for payment of a fee to cover costs.
But instead of building up organisations and working on attracting votes, some opposition parties, and especially the CCC, are more interested in trying to prove that their loss, which they seem to predict, is due to machinations within the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission rather than because they are winning less votes than the winners.
The latest was the attempt to get hold of copies of the electronic version of the voters roll, something ZEC is reluctant to just dish out since this can be manipulated and which can also contain private information.
ZEC wishes to maintain the integrity of the voters roll, and considering the sort of problems that have occurred in the past when non-authorised and non-correction electronic copies have become public, there are good grounds for ZEC’s careful approach.
The High Court recently agreed when it faced an application from a CCC member of the National Assembly. It turned the MP down flat, both on the grounds brought up by ZEC and the fact that the MP and ZEC were still negotiating when the application was launched.
A lot of work goes into maintaining the voters roll. ZEC accepts applications from non-voting citizens living in Zimbabwe continuously, and even has regular blitzes where it sends teams out to attract these non-voting resident citizens. But anybody can register at any time.
ZEC does of course check the applications. In the last big push, last year before the start of the latest delimitation, those checks produced a large block of people who were registering a second time.
They were already on the roll, but wanted to go back on it again. ZEC, and other observers, were wondering if attempts by some NGOs to pay, unofficially, those who registered was the reason.
But there was the start of a whispering campaign that ZEC was refusing to register some opposition supporters before it became obvious that these were second time registrants, and were quite rightly excluded for a second vote.
That was the only real action by ZEC, although it could have pushed a lot harder and had these people charged in court.
Fairly regularly now, ZEC removes the names of dead people from the roll. When a family has a death recorded, and this is needed to get a permit for burial, they have to hand in the dead person’s ID card, or at least a copy, and that allows both the recording of the death on the Registrar-General’s data base and on the ZEC database.
This means that dead people cannot apply for passports, pensions or a vote, or rather that someone else cannot assume the identity of a dead person to do this.
Since features change over the decades a lot of photographs on ID cards do not look that much like the person holding the card, so the extra check of recording deaths is needed.
In some respects the voters roll is always out of date. The latest death will take time to result in the crossing off of the name; the latest application will take at least a few days to make the list.
And a lot of people who change their address do not bother, at least promptly and routinely, to tell ZEC that they now need to vote at a different station in a different ward and probably in a different constituency.
This is one reason for that additional check, of inking a finger of each voter as they obtain their ballots on voting day so at least no one can physically vote twice, even if they have access to some dead relatives ID card or have managed to obtain a multiple identity through some other fraud.
The opposition also likes to claim that there was cheating at the ZEC level. The courts, as recently as the election petition on the last Presidential poll, have consistently dismissed this after going through the evidence and finding that there is no evidence of cheating.
There have been successful challenges in the longer past of over-robust campaigning, but no such claims have been made in the last two sets of harmonised polls, simply because such campaigning at local level has been stopped by parties and candidates.
But one of the most obvious ways every candidate can ensure that their registered supporters can vote and that the votes are counted is to take advantage of the law. Every candidate is entitled to have an agent at every polling station in the particular constituency they are contesting.
Some have difficulty finding the necessary team to take advantage of this, but a candidate who cannot find this committed inner team cannot have that much support to start with.
Anyone likely to come in the first two or three in a ward, constituency or Presidential election must have enough supporters to extract such a team, and all it requires is some sort of organisation to line everyone up.
Here Zanu PF, as a mass party with formal membership lists, can produce a large pool of potential agents even in the wards and constituencies where it might be a very bad second, and the organisation simply has to choose the best.
Most opposition parties do not have this pool; they might have supporters, but not tried and tested party members.
The CCC is particularly bad in this respect, being largely just a group of self-appointed leaders from a number of the innumerable MDC splits over the last couple of decades, but no formal membership, no leadership elections, no primaries to choose the best candidate and exclude the totally hopeless, and no pool of the committed to back up its candidates as agents.
So, like some candidates in some other countries, and the last Presidential election in even the US produced this, those who come second have to lie that they were cheated or there was skulduggery, rather than have a decent organisation and policies and candidates that can attract support.
Because in the end, you win an election by getting the most votes, and that means you need policies people agree with, candidates whom they respect, and preferably some sort of track record of doing a decent job, showing you or at least your party can deliver.
Across Africa voters in recent years have been holding political leaders and parties to account, rather than being swayed by rallies and speeches, and showing that they really want competent people who can deliver.
And this is the most positive development of the now post-colonial majority of voters who are not looking at how freedom was won, but rather at how they can use that freedom to choose people who will build a better future.
So dealing with trivia and seeking excuses for losing is not really the way to go. You lose because someone better won.
Online Reporter