Rita Makarau, the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), revealed they had received 262 applications for postal voting from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Hebson Makuvise, the Zimbabwe ambassador to Germany, confirmed to SW Radio Africa that staff at the Berlin mission cast their ballots on Tuesday.
‘We got our ballots in sealed envelopes, marked and put them back in sealed envelopes ready to be dispatched to Harare,’ the Ambassador said.
This is also the first time that ambassadors, drawn from other political parties than ZANU PF, have participated in the postal voting. The exercise commenced on Monday as the envoys cast their ballots in 42 missions around the world.
The envoys’ spouses, children above 18 and household staff are also allowed to vote abroad. Trudy Stevenson, the Ambassador in Dakar, Senegal said she and her husband will be voting after they got their ballots on Tuesday. The embassy has a staff compliment of four officers.
‘Other embassies got their ballots much earlier than us because they are easily accessible. I’m happy we received ours today (Tuesday) and I will be exercising my democratic right to vote.
‘Once we are done we will use a courier to send them back home. I was disappointed not to have voted in the referendum as our government had no capacity to allow us to do so,’ Ambassador Stevenson said.
At the end of the postal voting process, all envelopes will be sent to Harare, where they will be guarded in a safe ZEC location until Election Day. On July 31st, after the polls close in the country, the votes of diplomats and representatives abroad will be counted, together with the votes of the general public.
Meanwhile, scores of people who failed to register to vote demonstrated at the ZEC head offices Monday afternoon demanding to be registered.
The group, comprised of people usually referred to as ‘aliens’ by the registrar-general’s offices, was wielding placards reading, ‘ZEC Please registers us’, ‘We are Zimbabweans’ and ‘we want to vote.’
Reports claim the group also demanded an audience with ZEC chairperson Makarau. Kimberly Nyatsanga who led the protestors, most of them from the capital’s Mabvuku high density suburb, told reporters that the electoral body should allow them to vote or give them the chance to renounce their foreign citizenships before the July 31st vote.
After the adoption of a new constitution in May this year, the country introduced new voter registration measures that were set to restore the voting rights of ‘aliens’ who were disenfranchised more than a decade ago and are descendants of migrants from neighbouring southern African countries.
Despite this, thousands of Zimbabwean-born descendants of people who settled in Zimbabwe were turned away from voter registration centres around the country. – SW Radio Africa News
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