ZEC gives 5.4 m TEN (10) days to correct voters' roll - proof Zanu PF does not want verified roll, never did

There was no way that ZEC was ever going to produce a verified voters' roll in the time allowed. The Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) should have started by January 2015, at the very latest, it was delayed until September 2017. First, ZEC officials announce at the end of the main voter registration exercise, in mid February 2018, that they have managed to register only 5.3 million voters out of the expected 7 million.  So nearly 25% of the voters were being denied the vote. Now ZEC tells us even more bad news.

"The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) Chairperson, Priscilla Chigumba has blocked members of the public from accessing the electoral roll's database," reported Zimeye.

"Speaking this week, Justice Chigumba made these statements while announcing that the electoral roll is now at about 5,4 million people

"She also made a strong apparent admission that so far already there are duplicate entries in the database as she said that Zimbabwe is incapable  of solving the problem and it will require new laws to remove them."

There two key issues worth noting here:

1) The credibility of the whole voting exercise depends on the whole system being seen to be transparent and open for all to see what is happening. Having a verified voters' roll is one of the key requirements to a credible process. How can the voters' roll be verified if access to it is denied?

2) If the data collected in the field was down loaded onto the main system the basis of the biometric key, the finger print or the eye iris or both to make it a double key, then it is impossible to have duplicate entries. ZEC must explain how that happened?

3) If the fault is the parent parliamentary law that allowed the down loading of the data to be done in such a way that it allowed duplicate entries, as Justice Chingumba is suggesting here. This was a very serious oversight on the part of parliament but given that this oversight is so fundamental, i.e. it is allowing the data to be down loaded without the biometric keys and thus defeating the whole purpose of having the biometric system. There can only be one conclusion; this was a deliberate and calculated move.

As part and parcel of the voters' roll verification process ZEC will be producing a provisional voters' roll which will be available for inspection from May 19 to 29, ten days.

"It is referred to as Provisional Voters' Roll because it may undoubtedly contain some errors that the public may pick out for correction during inspection before it is gazetted as the final voters roll," explained Justice Chigumba.

"In fact, the inspection of the provisional voters' roll is in itself a cleaning process as it will assist in removing errors related to addresses, date of births, wrong ID numbers, polling station postings and names."

How many, people will be able to inspect the provisional voters' roll check the address, date of birth, etc., etc. and, most important of all as regards these elections, polling station postings are correct, in TEN DAYS?

Nearly one million voters in 2013 were denied the vote because their details were not in the constituency voters' roll they expected it to be. This year even more voters could be denied the vote since individual details will be available in only ONE polling station. So once the definitive voters' roll has been produced, even if the voter's details are in the right constituency, it could be any one of the 25 polling stations! A lot more than one million will be denied the chance to vote by the simple act of polling station postings alone!

There is no way ZEC is going to produce verifiable voters' roll, many of us have said this as far back as 2015 when the cut-off date of starting the BVR was missed. It is IMPOSSIBLE to have free, fair and credible elections without a verified voters' roll!