HARARE Zimbabwes voters roll is in shambles and should be completely overhauled before the next general election to eliminate cases of multiple entries and weed out ghost voters, according to a new report released last week. (Pictured: A woman showing her finger during operation red finger)An audit of the voters roll conducted by the Research and Advocacy Unit of pressure group Sokwanele unearthed several anomalies in the current voters roll maintained by the Registrar Generals Office.
These include a surprisingly large number of people aged 100 and above. The audit identified names of 74 021 voters aged above 100 on the roll used in last years harmonised parliamentary and presidential elections. There were also 82 456 people registered who are aged between 90 and 100.
These figures are quite amazing when you consider that average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 34 for women and 37 for men, and in light of the fact that the World Health Organisation predicts that only 14.7 percent of people live beyond 60 in Zimbabwe, the pressure group observed in a report titled 2013 Vision Seeing Double and the Dead.
Zimbabwe has an estimated people and the large number of elderly persons listed on the voters roll means that centenarians make up close to one percent of the countrys population.
The Sokwanele researchers said they were not able to determine whether the very large number of elderly people on the voters roll (over 17 percent of the roll comprises people aged 60 and over) are living or deceased.
They said attempts to get an electronic copy of registered deaths were unsuccessful.
Under Zimbabwe s repressive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the RAU researchers were obliged to apply to the Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede for an electronic copy of registered deaths.
The Registrar-General is obligated to reply within 30 days of receiving the request but he failed to comply with the law.
The audit also discovered a large number of duplicate entries on the roll.
The report noted that despite denials by Mudede that there was no way identity numbers could appear twice in the same roll, the audit proved that several ID numbers, names, addresses, birth dates and all details were duplicated.
Specifically: 182 564 instances of duplicate entries were identified where people were registered in two or more constituencies simultaneously, the report said.
The report acknowledges that this is could happen if, for example, a person was registered in one constituency during one poll, and another a second time.
The researchers however pointed out that about two thirds of the constituency shifts occur in rural areas, and therefore do not reflect the typical rural-urban migration pattern that has taken place in recent years in Zimbabwe.
The audit also revealed discrepancies in numbers of voters registered in wards compared to the actual numbers that voted in the 2008 elections.
In one of the instances, Beitbridge East had three voters registered in Ward 3 but an astonishing 339 people cast their votes in that ward.
The audit also discovered that about 676 887 voters had been deregistered since 2002, the bulk of whom were Malawian and Mozambican farm labourers and white Zimbabweans.
“The ostensible reason for their removal from the roll was that they had not renounced their entitlement to foreign citizenship and thus forfeited Zimbabwean citizenship,” the report said.
However, the real motivation for deregistration of these voters appears to be to de-register those likely to vote against Zanu (PF).
Sokwanele warned that an inflated voters roll was a threat to free and fair elections.
The current state of the voters rolls indicates that piecemeal repair is neither desirable nor practical. A re-registration process for the entire country before the next general election by an independent electoral specialist such as Waymark, is not only feasible but would be an important step towards ensuring democratic, universally acceptable and procedurally transparent elections in Zimbabwe, the group said.
Post published in: News