Polling Stations

However they were
unable to give us the locations of the additional stations. We argued that
even with 241 it was impossible to capture all the potential voters in one
day of 12 hours. We did the calculations for them and were astonished to
learn that they had not thought about it in those terms. They asked us to
give them a justification for more polling stations tomorrow and to this end
we have pulled in all Chief Election Agents and are working on a revised
list of polling Stations.

If you look at the present list we have one district with 27 000 voters with
only 13 stations – 20100 voters per station. Even with only a 60 per cent
turn out (what we expect in the high density urban areas) we would expect
1300 per station. We asked ZEC what they were working on and one official
said 60 per cent and 5 minutes per voter. We pointed out that this was only
144 voters per station in 12 hours! We said even if you assumed they would
handle 3 voters simultaneously – they could only process 500 voters per
station. We therefore asked for double the numbers of stations – 500 instead
of 241.

This is a battle that must be fought in every City and Town – we will report
the outcome of tomorrows meeting. ZEC was busy ordering all the materials
required for the 241 stations this morning so getting double the numbers is
not going to be easy.

Eddie  Cross