ZESN claims 750,000 voters missing from voters roll

With less than three weeks to go before the election this will buttress the MDC-T’s recent claims that an Israeli based company with offices in Harare was allegedly contracted by ZANU PF to manipulate the voters roll.

ZESN said it noted serious irregularities in the voters’ roll purchased by the organisation from the office of the Registrar General on 19th June. Voting patterns from previous elections show that urban areas are naturally strongholds of the MDC-T.

‘We have noted that the biggest irregularity in the roll is the under-registration of voters especially in the urban wards. For instance ZESN has found that there are about 750 000 missing urban voters from the voters’ roll,’ ZESN said in a statement on Friday.

The watchdog said it conducted a demographic analysis of the voters’ roll on all 5,890,169 names from all 1,964 wards and 210 constituencies, compared to the official 2012 Census data from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency.

Another report issued last week by the Harare based Research and Advocacy Unit, also revealed discrepancies between the number of potential voters on the latest voters’ roll and the population census conducted last year.

In its analysis entitled ‘key statistics from the June 2013 voters' roll’ RAU found that only 8% of the 2012 population of 18-19 year olds was registered to vote.

Around 45,000 youth were found on the roll, versus the over 500,000 found in the census. In groups from the ages of 20-29 the unit also reported a difference of nearly 630,000 between potential voters and the census population.

Ages 25-29 had a population census total of 1,063, 852 with the voters roll recording 549,946 people.

On Tuesday, the MDC-T’ secretary-general Tendai Biti claimed that at least 300,000 prospective voters in Harare alone had been denied the right to participate in the forthcoming general elections.

Biti told journalists that millions of Zimbabweans were indirectly blocked from registering as voters during the registration exercise that closed on Tuesday.

Officials from the Registrar General’s Office were accused of employing delaying tactics to frustrate prospective voters in urban centres during the 30-day exercise. – SW Radio Africa News