HARARE – The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is still refusing to provide a digital copy of the voters’ roll, making life difficult for computer experts trying to uncover evidence of vote-rigging in Zimbabwe’s controversial general election.
Nearly five weeks after the elections, which Robert Mugabe lost, there is still no publicly available copy of the full list of registered voters. Nor have any official presidential election results been published, apart from the confused announcements by ZEC, which has culminated in the recount last weekend that reproduced the original results.
Human rights activists auditing the March 29 poll have unearthed huge discrepancies in voting patterns, voters who are dead, multiple registered votes and possibly thousands of voters with fake identity numbers.
Some of the disclosures are contained in a legal petition, issued this week by the MDC, challenging 60 election results won by Zanu (PF).
The MDC has filed election petitions with the Electoral Court challenging the election results for 60 House of Assembly seats won by Zanu (PF). The hearing of these petitions has not yet started. But, if successful, this could take the MDC parliamentary majority to 170 of the 210 seats.
The human rights activists auditing the poll believe that they are on the brink of exposing evidence of outright fraud. “The key is the voters’ roll,” said one of the auditors, “but ZEC won’t give it to us. What can we assume, except that they have something to hide?”
Registrar of Voters Tobaiwa Mudede has said that he will give them a 100,000-page document containing 5.9 million names. But that, the auditors said, was “just a truckload of paper. It would be impossible to handle.”
Each page contains the details of 55 voters, and takes an hour to input on a computer. A comprehensive analysis can be done only on digital data. Mudede wants £15,000 for the voters’ roll on compact discs, the same as the official charge for the paper documents.
The Zimbabwean heard that, just before the election, ZEC secretly registered another 400,000 people, but only in perceived Zanu (PF) strongholds. ZEC has refused to make this “supplementary roll” public.
The auditors did manage to obtain from the Registrar-General’s office the paper documents of the final list of voters in two constituencies in perceived Mugabe’s heartland. The auditors input 5,000 names from one of them, Uzumba into a computer programmed with the digital formula that the National Registration Centre, the repository of national identity cards, uses to configure ID numbers to be able to check validity.
“We ran them through the test and 9.8 per cent were invalid,” one of the auditors said.
The MDC is again asking the High Court to order ZEC to produce the full voters’ roll. ZEC is due to respond to the challenge in court.
Post published in: News