In their article of 18 August, Prof. Nic Cheeseman and Dr Nicole Beardsworth suggested that Zambia’s 13 August election was flawed and may need to be rerun. This is a serious charge, and deserves a serious answer. Fortunately, most of that answer is already contained in their own article.
Consider what the authors themselves concede. Election day was calm and orderly, with observers from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) reporting a peaceful atmosphere at 99% of the polling stations they visited. Independent verification by Transparency International Zambia (TI-Z) found what the authors call a “very close correspondence” between the results announced by the electoral commission and those recorded by TI-Z’s own monitors, a match of 98.9%.
And by their own arithmetic, their “unverified estimate” of questionable votes, even taken entirely at face value and subtracted wholesale from the president’s column, would not change the outcome. President Hakainde Hichilema would still have won in the first round, comfortably above the 50% threshold. They write, in their own words, that “this form of vote inflation did not determine the outcome of the polls”. The article then runs under a headline calling for a rerun. The headline is not supported by the paragraphs beneath it.
What remains is a single statistical observation. Namely, that in some constituencies, more votes were cast for president than for members of parliament. The authors treat this as a warning sign of manipulation.
There is a far simpler explanation, and it is one Dr Beardsworth knows intimately, because she is the first named author of the research that documented it.
In March 2026, the Zambia Election Research Network published its first survey findings through the University of Cape Town’s Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa, analysed and written up by Dr Beardsworth and three colleagues. That survey found that only 33% of Zambians planned to vote for their sitting MP, that 24% wanted the same party to field a different candidate, and that a mere 15% intended to vote for their incumbent councillor.
The same survey put the president’s approval at 79%, and concluded that he was heading for a comfortable re-election, while warning of what the authors called “major electoral vulnerability at sub-national levels”.
In plain terms, Zambians told these researchers, months before the vote, that they would turn out for their president while punishing their parliamentarians. On 13 August, that is exactly what they did. The gap the authors now present as evidence of manipulation is the gap their own survey predicted.
If the authors are confident in their datasets, they should publish it in full so that it can be checked, line by line, against the Gen 20 forms.
Political scientists have a name for this behaviour. It is called roll-off. It is common in every democracy that holds simultaneous elections.
The geography of the gaps confirms the point rather than undermining it. Dissatisfaction with MPs was most pronounced in north-western and western provinces, precisely where the president’s approval and net favourability were at some of the highest, and where the party’s adoption process generated the most visible anger. A voter in Solwezi who queued patiently to reelect her president and then declined to reward an MP she considered a failure was not evidence of fraud. She was exercising discernment. That the authors’ framework interprets her judgement as a crime statistic says more about the framework than about Zambia.
Results in Zambian elections are recorded on Gen 20 forms, completed and posted publicly at each polling station in the presence of party agents and observers before anything travels anywhere. A parallel projection, built purely from those station-level forms on the morning of 14 August, put the race at 60.6% to 38.7%. The final declared result was almost identical.
If hundreds of thousands of votes had been injected somewhere between the polling station and the national declaration, the final tally would have diverged sharply from that early station-level picture. It did not move. And five days on, no one has produced a single polling station anywhere in Zambia where the publicly posted result differs from the figure the commission announced.
Against this stands an analysis the authors describe, repeatedly and candidly, as “unverified”, based on “publicly circulated figures”, covering 16 constituencies selected by the authors themselves, and compiled, while the parliamentary count was still incomplete.
Indeed, as of this week, the commission’s own results portal still showed constituencies awaiting parliamentary results altogether. Comparing a finished presidential count against an unfinished parliamentary one will manufacture turnout gaps by simple arithmetic.
If the authors are confident in their dataset, they should publish it in full so that it can be checked, line by line, against the Gen 20 forms. We would welcome that exercise without reservation.
Zambia’s Constitution provides a clear route for any candidate who disputes a result. They can file a petition before the constitutional court, within defined timelines, tested against evidence. That process is open, and it will be respected. What the constitution does not provide for is the annulment of eight million people’s votes by op-ed.
The electoral commission budgeted 1.7 billion Kwacha (about US$91m) for this election, an exercise involving almost nine million registered voters, more than 13,000 polling stations and close to 90,000 staff. A rerun would conservatively consume the price of several hundred fully equipped ambulances in a country still building out rural emergency care. Those proposing one on the strength of an unverified spreadsheet should be asked to say so to the communities that would pay for it.
A last observation. When elections are stolen, people do not pour into the streets to celebrate. They protest, or they stay home behind locked doors.
What Zambia saw on declaration day were joyous scenes at the University of Zambia (UNZA) and Community House, and then something more telling still. The next morning, Lusaka was simply normal. Markets opened, people went to work, life carried on, because Zambians were confident their voices had been heard.
Compare that with scenes in Harare (Zimbabwe), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), or Kampala (Uganda) after recent elections there, and you will understand the quiet trust Zambians place in their own process. That trust was earned in 2021, when this system delivered a transfer of power the authors rightly celebrated, and it was renewed on 13 August. Zambia has voted.
Zambia has moved forward. We invite our critics to check the forms.
Zaza is a lawyer, civil rights activist and member of Action Governance Forum (AGF), a non-profit organisation. The article was first published by theafricareport.com on 19 August 2026.
