Speaking at a stakeholders’ feedback meeting on the pilot voter registration exercise conducted early this year, Makarau told delegates yesterday that they would adopt the old roll and make improvements on it.
She said the law prohibited ZEC from compiling a completely new roll. "ZEC cannot invent a new voters' roll. The law is very specific and so we adopt the old one. The faults will now be ours.
“To us as ZEC,it will all be new because it will be the first time to handle registration of voters which was previously done by the RG, but on the other hand it will still be the old voters' roll that we will use," she said.
She said it was common practice for Zimbabweans to use documents from the RG’s office.
"We might not like Mudede, but the current system makes use of documents from his office. Tell me what other documents can we use then, our degrees?" she said.
The old voters’ roll is fraught with anomalies, omissions and inclusion of ghost voters. Participants said there was need to regular testing of the roll to ensure credibility and urged ZEC to produce a new voter register.
"Zec should start on a clean slate. My party still will not participate in any elections until the reforms have been implemented," said Murisi Zwizwai, a senior MDC-T member and MP.
"People want to know if there is going to be a new one or how the old one will be cleaned up so that once again credible elections might be held," he said.
He bemoaned the fact that ZEC still manually registered voters.
Post published in: News