Former South African electoral commissioner Peter Harris has made shock disclosures that the country’s 1994 results were tampered with by a hacker to give inflated marks to three opposition parties.
In a book to be released soon, but has been widely reported on, Harris says the hacker fidgeted with the system and “there is (was) a real concern that with every hour that the country does not receive election results, the potential for violence increase”
Harris made the revelations in his book Birth: The Conspiracy to Stop
the ’94 Election.
“The hacker went in between 05:56 and 06:41 on the morning of May 3
and made changes to the vote count of three parties,” he says.
Among the parties who benefited were the National Party, which had led
South Africa from 1984, whose vote share increased by around three
per cent and the right-wing Freedom Front party which saw its vote share pushed up by between 2.5 per cent and four per cent Inkatha Freedom Party’s tally went up between 4% and 5%.
However, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was declared winner with 62.6 percent of the vote, NP 20.4% and the IFP got 10.5 percent.
The book says there was a period where the release of the results was “frozen” by officials as “…there is a real concern that with every hour that the country does not receive election results, the potential for violence increases,”.
“The frozen election results place the country in limbo. Fear feeds on fear and the political mercury rises. The spooks tell us that security forces have been placed on high alert,” says Harris.
The ANC has been the ruling party of post apartheid South Africa on the national level since 1994.
It gained support in the 1999 elections, and further increased its majority in 2004, with 69.7% of the votes.
In 2009 its share of the vote reduced slightly, but it remained the
dominant party with 65.9% of the votes.
