'ZEC misleading opposition parties in fresh voter registration'

A political commentator Pedzisai Ruhanya has claimed that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is misleading the opposition political parties into believing that there was genuine fresh voter registration to start on May 2018 while the organization has been registering its own voters on behalf of Zanu PF secretly.

"ZEC is misleading the opposition into believing that a fresh voter registration will start in May 2018. ZEC and Zanu PF have been registering their voters clandestinely and in some instances officially during the by-elections boycotted by some opposition," Ruhanya said. "When it becomes official and public, it will be game over. Without ignoring other multiple sites of contestation, the notion of electoral authoritarianism privileges one of them—the electoral arena."

He said it assumes elections constitute the central arena of struggle (Schedler, 2006; Levitsky and Way 2002: 54). Schedler (2006) further submitted that today the most common form of political regime in the developing world is electoral authoritarianism.

"Electoral authoritarian regimes hold regular multiparty elections for parliament and the chief executive. Yet they violate liberal-democratic minimum standards of freedom, fairness, and integrity in so systematic and profound ways as to render elections instruments of authoritarian rule, rather than instruments of democracy," he said.