Voters’ roll the key to fair elections

There are hundreds of thousands of names on it of people who are over 100 years old – thousands of them with the date of birth of 01.01.1901 and many hundreds of them residing at the same address. Given that the average life expectancy of Zimbabweans today is 46 for men and 45 for women, this is clearly a figment of somebody’s imagination.

If we are going to have legitimate and credible elections, the results of which nobody can contest, it is vital that the voters roll be made widely and freely open for inspection by the public in the way that it used to be. People need to be able to check whether their names are on it and, perhaps more importantly, whether those of their dead relatives are still there.

In the early years of our independence, copies of the roll were available at district offices throughout the country. For the past decade or more the roll has been something of a state secret. Why did this change?

The checking of the roll should be a transparent exercise that the Registrar General’s office is committed to facilitating as a top priority. There should also be a comparison with the national census results to see if the roll makes sense in the light of the census findings. For example, alarm bells should ring in an area where there are 700,000 names on the roll but where the census says there are 500,000 adults residing.

The results of the recent referendum are a serious cause for concern. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the figures were cooked. There were no day-long queues at the polling booths as was the case in 2002 – when polling took three days and many people waited more than 15 hours in the queue. Yet ZEC would have us believe that more people voted this time around.

In our view the referendum was nothing short of gigantic electoral fraud. We are surprised that Tendai Biti is the only politician querying the results. All sitting MPs and candidates for the forthcoming elections should be worried about this. It is painfully evident that the results of the 2013 election will not reflect the will of the people – but rather that of the ballot box stuffer.

It is also worrying that Zanu (PF) is the only party with the prerogative to choose international observers. As in the past these will be their friends – the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans – none of whom has a track record of respect for democracy and human rights. We do not deny them the right to invite their friends – but we do insist that this right should be extended to all parties contesting the elections. The Secretary General of the MDC-T, Tendai Biti, has raised the red flag that Zimbabwe is heading towards yet another flawed election unless the current voters’ roll is cleaned up. At best the roll can be described as a complete shambles.

There are hundreds of thousands of names on it of people who are over 100 years old – thousands of them with the date of birth of 01.01.1901 and many hundreds of them residing at the same address. Given that the average life expectancy of Zimbabweans today is 46 for men and 45 for women, this is clearly a figment of somebody’s imagination.

If we are going to have legitimate and credible elections, the results of which nobody can contest, it is vital that the voters roll be made widely and freely open for inspection by the public in the way that it used to be. People need to be able to check whether their names are on it and, perhaps more importantly, whether those of their dead relatives are still there.

In the early years of our independence, copies of the roll were available at district offices throughout the country. For the past decade or more the roll has been something of a state secret. Why did this change?

The checking of the roll should be a transparent exercise that the Registrar General’s office is committed to facilitating as a top priority. There should also be a comparison with the national census results to see if the roll makes sense in the light of the census findings. For example, alarm bells should ring in an area where there are 700,000 names on the roll but where the census says there are 500,000 adults residing.

The results of the recent referendum are a serious cause for concern. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the figures were cooked. There were no day-long queues at the polling booths as was the case in 2002 – when polling took three days and many people waited more than 15 hours in the queue. Yet ZEC would have us believe that more people voted this time around.

In our view the referendum was nothing short of gigantic electoral fraud. We are surprised that Tendai Biti is the only politician querying the results. All sitting MPs and candidates for the forthcoming elections should be worried about this. It is painfully evident that the results of the 2013 election will not reflect the will of the people – but rather that of the ballot box stuffer.

It is also worrying that Zanu (PF) is the only party with the prerogative to choose international observers. As in the past these will be their friends – the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans – none of whom has a track record of respect for democracy and human rights. We do not deny them the right to invite their friends – but we do insist that this right should be extended to all parties contesting the elections.