HARARE, Zimbabwe — Zimbabweans voted Saturday on whether to keep the ruler blamed by opponents for their country’s economic collapse, though President Robert Mugabe’s challengers contended the election was rigged even before the polls opened.
The main opposition party said it was investigating reports of thousands of voters being turned away from polls and the discovery of stuffed ballot boxes in one district. African observers also questioned thousands of names on official rolls.
The election presented Mugabe with the toughest political challenge to his 28-year rule. He dismissed allegations that the vote was rigged to keep him in power.
“I cannot sleep with a clear conscience if there is any cheating,” Mugabe, 84, said after voting and promising to respect results. “If you lose an election and are rejected by the people, it is time to leave politics.”
Voting was generally peaceful, with Zimbabweans standing in lines for hours. Preliminary results are expected by Monday. If no candidate wins 50 percent plus one vote, there will be a runoff.
Running against Mugabe are opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, 56, who narrowly lost disputed 2002 elections, and former ruling party loyalist and finance minister Simba Makoni, 58. Makoni’s defection is a sign of growing dissent within Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union party. Although he could take support from Mugabe, Makoni also could divide the opposition vote.
Opposition leaders accuse Mugabe of dictatorship and destroying the economy. Mugabe calls his opponents stooges of former colonial ruler Britain and says the nation must make sacrifices to overcome its colonial legacy.
The economic collapse of Zimbabwe has dominated the campaign. The nation once fed itself and helped feed its neighbors, but now a third of its population depends on international food handouts and remittances from relatives abroad.
Unemployment stands at 80 percent — the same percentage that survives on less than $1 a day. Inflation is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent, and people suffer crippling shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine.
In southern Bulawayo, an opposition stronghold, Moffat Simon Mabhena, 78, was among many who lined up to vote hours before dawn.
“We want to see change in this country,” Mabhena said. “I want to see Robert Mugabe out.”
Zimbabwe barred several international media organizations from its elections as well as observers traveling from the United States and the European Union.
“There are a lot of big question marks hanging over this election in terms of the integrity of the electoral process,” U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday.
The independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network’s monitors reported a heavy police presence at polling stations, ostensibly to help illiterate voters and allowed under a belated presidential decree that breaks an agreement signed with the opposition. The opposition said it was intimidation.
Tendai Biti, a senior official in Tsvangirai’s party, told reporters that his party’s agents reported 200 voters — more than half of those who had cast votes in that polling place — were assisted by police in an area where the illiteracy rate was closer to 10 percent.
About 9,000 polling stations were set up for 5.9 million registered voters, the official count. But Biti said the real number was closer to 3.5 million because the rolls were inflated with names of dead or fictitious people, and economic and political refugees who left the country.
Observers question election
Zimbabweans vote in a race that could end a 28-year rule.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe
Title: President of Zimbabwe
Born: Feb. 21, 1924, in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, a British colony
Education: Law degree earned in prison while campaigning for Zimbabwean independence. Led victorious guerrilla war and was elected president when Zimbabwe won independence in 1980.
Family: Married to second wife, with three children. First wife and their son died of illness.
Morgan Tsvangirai
Title: President and founder of biggest faction in opposition Movement for Democratic Change
Born: March 10, 1952, in Southern Rhodesia
Education: Left high school to help support his family. Graduated from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2001 with diploma in Executive Leaders in Development Program.
Family: Married, with six children
Simba Makoni
Titles: Former finance minister, former executive secretary of Southern African Development Community, former politburo member of governing Zimbabwe African National Union party
Born: March 22, 1950, in Southern Rhodesia
Education: Expelled from high school and later University of Zimbabwe for political activity. Bachelor of science degree in chemistry and zoology, Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry.
Family: Married, with three children
The Associated Press
