Zec allays fears of dead people on voters’ roll

By Farayi Machamire

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) is working round the clock to cleanse the voters’ roll of any ghost voters. As part of efforts to keep a clean voters’ roll, Zec has asked the Registrar General (RG)’s office to submit to the elections management body a list of dead people every month.

“If the RGs tells us someone is dead, we take their word..,” Zec commissioner Netsai Mushonga said on her twitter account.

Mushonga said no person would be removed from the voters’ roll without any valid reason.

By end of April, there were at least 5 000 registered voters who died before the finalisation of the biometric voter registration (BVR) exercise, according to Zec statistics.

It is a legal requirement that all deaths are reported and entered into a register of deaths.

Before the current BVR exercise, the elections management body had been criticised for not deleting the dead from the voters’ roll and allowing duplications to inflate the roll.

Nearly one-third of Zimbabwe’s registered voters at the time were reportedly dead.

Anomalies in the voters’ roll open the door for double voting and other rigging intentions.

Mushonga also allayed fears that Zec had set up “ghost polling stations for manipulation” after it emerged that the electoral management body would be adding additional polling sites for voters.

This comes as there are calls for Zec to gazette the names, location and number of polling stations in the interest of transparency.

“We are experts in election management and splitting one polling station into several with a thousand makes it easier for us to expedite your voting. Having 7 000 people in one room is a recipe for disaster!” she exclaimed.

“Our threshold is 1 000 voters so where there are more than 1 000 we will create more polling stations. We figure each polling station can process only 1 000 voters in 12 hours and not more. Simple!”  DailyNews