Washington
With a new round of national elections likely to be held some time in 2012, politicians and civil society activists are wrangling over electoral legislation that proposes to manage voter registration and voting at a local level. There are fears of manipulation by partisan local authorities.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, the leading civic group in this domain, says the proposed system could encourage tactics such as displacing voters from their polling wards to prevent them from casting ballots.
ZESN earlier this year urged the overhaul of the national voters roll after an audit found 27 percent of eligible voters listed therein to be deceased.
The director, Rindai Chipfunde-Vava, said that while local registration and voter rolls may be widely used in other countries, such a system was not right for Zimbabwe given the current political climate and past abuses of the electoral system.
ZESN recommends the relaxation of postal voting rules making that method more widely available to persons who for whatever reason cannot be at the polling station on voting day.
But Elections Director Paul Themba Nyathi, of the MDC headed by Wellshman Ncube, said local control of the voting process could reduce election irregularities.
Legislators Paul Mangwana of ZANU-PF and Innocent Gonese of the MDC formation led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai debated the issue in a panel discussion.
Mangwana said localized voter registration would be the best thing that could happen to Zimbabwe’s electoral system, but Mwonzora expressed serious misgivings.
Gonese says the current situation in Zimbabwe does not require localized voting but the resolution of other issues having to do in particular with election-related violence.
Mangwana accused the Tsvangirai MDC formation of moving the goalposts on electoral reform, which he said unity government negotiators had comprehensively addressed.
Post published in: News