Godfrey Tembo
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South) – The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has been found wanting just months before the country goes to the polls with massive irregularities that may lead to an unfair election in 2018 being unearthed in the recently held Chiwundura Parliamentary by-election.
A team of local civil society organisations that monitored the elections has revealed a frightening level of mismanagement that saw ghost people flooding voter’s rolls in the constituency in elections that were, as expected, won by a Zanu-PF candidate.
According to the two watchdogs — Election Resource Centre (ERC) and Zimbabwe Election Support Network (Zesn) they was massive fraud after they conducted an audit.
“(The) audit revealed (that) 863 (people) are registered more than once and appear in different polling stations, there are 132 voters with ID (identity) numbers that are invalid and 218 voters with ID numbers that have a suffix that does not conform to the National Registration Act,” ERC said in a statement yesterday.
The revelation validates accusations by opposition parties that elections in Zimbabwe are unfair and that ZEC is not capable of running a proper legitimate election.
The ERC noted that some polling stations in Chiwundura were located at homesteads while “724 records, with exactly the same first name, surname, gender, date of birth but different ID number and in most cases at different polling stations”, were unearthed.
This happening has confirmed the worst fears of the opposition that 2018 elections without reforms will be another empty act of democracy.
The Zec chairperson Rita Makarau has since been reported in the media confirming receiving the report from the organisations.
“We received the report on Friday and welcome this sort of engagement,” Makarau said.
“We are going, however, to engage the ERC and check whether they were using the voters’ roll we gave to the political parties after cleaning up our draft.”
To stem public fears and accusations Makarau stated that “ we want to assure the public that the biometric voters’ roll will deal with issues of multiple registrations because we will use the fingerprint that will detect such anomalies,” she said.
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