An ongoing disagreement over the use of parallel vote tabulation (PVT) in the upcoming elections has pitted the government against civil society groups and the opposition. PVT involves the monitoring of polling booths to ensure that the results announced by the electoral commission at individual polling stations are consistent with the nationwide result. Mr Banda has declared that PVT will not be permitted and asserted that it would be a "recipe for post-election anarchy". This has been strongly contested by civil society groups. Sam Mulafulafu, the executive director of one such group, Caritas Zambia, says that PVT would enhance the credibility of the election by assuring voters that ballot boxes had not been tampered with; unless they had in fact been tampered with, in which case PVT could not be blamed for any consequent unrest. Mr Mulafulafu also points out that PVT has, in effect, been used in Zambia before: the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) has been publishing results at each polling station since 2006, enabling any interested group to collate the results independently.

Mr Banda's concerns may reflect the decision of the main opposition party, the Patriotic Front, to train 12,000 poll monitors to conduct PVT. The opposition cannot be relied on to deliver an objective assessment any more than the ECZ can. The declaration of alternative-and quite possibly, spurious-results by the opposition could indeed cause confusion and stoke unrest. However, banning PVT would not prevent this, as indicated by the numerous occasions on which the opposition has contested election results in the past. Furthermore, there is little basis for preventing independent civil society groups from conducting PVT.

It remains unclear whether the government will relent on demands for PVT. Civil society groups may go ahead with it regardless, especially as the Law Association of Zambia has said that PVT is not illegal. If the government were to prevent it, this would only cement concerns about the election's credibility, raising the risk of election-related violence. However, a sustained deterioration in political stability would remain unlikely: politically related violence in Zambia has been limited in scale even when animosity has been high.