Early on the morning of Zimbabwe’s election I got up, stretched my legs and looked in the mirror. Not bad for 86, I thought. Even better for someone who had been dead for nigh on ten years. Then I got dressed and headed out into the bright morning sunshine and to the polls.

No one in the queue looked perturbed to see a ghost that morning, but that was exactly what I was. Only days earlier the opposition claimed to have discovered more than a million phantom voters — dead, emigrated or invented — on the electoral register.

The discovery, they said, was evidence of the ruling regime’s intention to steal the election. Then on the eve of the much-anticipated poll, came news that a team of African observers had discovered more than 8,000 voters in Harare registered on a empty patch of bushveld. The news was greeted with the customary black humour of the shrinking white community in Bulawayo. “Can you believe even Smith is on it?” the barman joked, alluding to the last leader of white-ruled Rhodesia. “He’ll be turning in his grave when he realised he’s voted for Mugabe.” The drinkers compared notes. Almost everyone had some dead relative still mysteriously enfranchised on the electoral register.

Which is how on Saturday morning I found myself heading to the polls clutching the old Rhodesian identity card of Fraser Johnston, born in Johannesburg in 1922, died in 1998. “Try it,” said his son, who lent me the card. “I want to see if it’s really that easy to cheat the system.”

It was intended not as a prank but a serious test of the system. If I could pass myself off as an 86-year-old white Zimbabwean, it would stand as compelling evidence of serious fraud built into the electoral framework. Johnston’s son wanted me to expose it.

There are many ways to rig an election, but ghost voting is one of the easiest. You don’t even need to go through this rigmarole of turning up to the polling station. Ghost voters, who cannot by definition cast their own votes, provide the perfect cover for the ballots you can stuff or add in later on, without risking the unfeasible mathematics of a turnout in excess of 100 per cent.

I was feeling remarkably spry when I set out for the polling station inside a once-exclusive golf club. A queue of 50 people waited to vote.

An elderly couple relaxed on folding chairs and filled mugs from their flask of tea. Another woman sat in the shade of a jacaranda tree, reading a novel she had brought for the wait. It was more than one and a half hours before I got inside. “It’s a long wait but we have to do it,” someone sighed. “We need change.” But there was fatigue too, the fear that however they voted, nothing would change at all.

Inside the station, the first polling officer checked my identity card. My resemblance to Mr Johnston was uncanny, I was told — not an altogether flattering assessment but one that would at least help me not to get nicked. His birthdate was a big problem: at half that age, I could not hope to pass as an octogenarian. The officer handed my card back and turned me away. “You’re not registered in this ward,” he said. A phone call solved that problem, but many other voters did not have that luxury. A quick turnaround and I was at a local primary school, where Johnston’s son believed his father must be registered. A long queue again, and the same talk of the desire for change.

By the time the polling officer took my card, the nerves had kicked in. My palms grew clammy as she dragged her finger down the voter’s roll. I noticed for the first time that the dates of birth were included not just on my identity card, but also on the list. And yet my extreme youthfulness went unremarked. My little finger was dipped in bright pink ink and I was dispatched to the booth. A couple of bored-looking policemen looked on, but did not pass comment or interfere as one by one I carefully spoiled my ballot, placing crosses in every box to make absolutely certain that it could not be counted. Then I walked away.

My heart was racing when I got back to the house. It was hard to believe how easy it had been to cheat the system. Then a moment of panic gripped. What I had done, I had done in the public interest, with no effect on the outcome of the poll. Still, it was a crime.

(All names have been changed)

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