An eye witness has reported: I was in Emerson Mnangagwa’s constituency last week and met senior war veterans. I had lunch at Mvuma Thursday 13 June with a senior war veteran who works with officials in the Registrar General’s office who are taking part in the mobile voter registration exercise that commenced on Monday 10 June 2013.
The rigging mechanism is very easy. Prior to the commencement of the voter registration exercise, Zanu Pf provincial commissariat officials compiled lists of all Zanu Pf supporters at cell, ward and district levels, in all rural constituencies. Using the 2008 March harmonized elections statistics, Zanu Pf has identified so-called swing constituencies, in which the party either won or lost marginally.
The plot is to increase the party’s chances in these constituencies. When the mobile voter registration exercise comes to an end in early July, the Zanu Pf-aligned registration offices will sit down with the provincial voters’ rolls of swing constituencies and the lists of Zanu Pf supporters from the swing constituencies submitted to them by the party.
They will pick out names on the voters’ rolls which do not appear on the rolls submitted by Zanu Pf, and make slight alterations to spellings or national identification numbers to some of them. There will only be about 3 weeks between the end of the mobile registration exercise and the election itself, and so there won’t be time for many people to inspect the final voters’ rolls and to make corrections to any alterations effected to their personal details. So on the Election Day itself many voters from the so-called swing constituencies will not be able to vote because of the errors to their personal details in the voters’ rolls.
In addition to the above, take note of what I told you earlier. Zanu Pf commissariat members are holding meetings in all rural constituencies, and the gospel they are spreading is that come election day each village will file into the polling station behind their respective village heads. Each village head will be required to note and report anybody who will be missing or who will have cast their vote at a polling station other than the one designated for their village by the local Zanu Pf leadership. They are telling the villagers that this will be done to make it easy to identify people who would have voted for the MDC so that they can be punished. This was done on 27 June 2008, and in some areas during the just ended constitutional referendum.
Post published in: News