Opinion / Columnist
Our hands are clean, claims Team Pachedu
10 Mar 2022 at 06:12hrs | Views
WE would like to put it on record that Team Pachedu has, indeed, submitted our concerns to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) and it has not responded.
We have also personally sent it requests for various information which it has ignored. (We had asked for a full list of candidates from the January 26 nomination court, as well as a full list of accredited observers for the March 26 by-elections). Zec has not responded to our request.
Team Pachedu has taken care to censor as much information identifying voters as possible in tweets to protect the identities of voters.
This also puts us in a difficult position where the general public cannot verify some of our claims for themselves on the Zec BVR site because we block names and ID numbers as much as possible, while still trying to prove our point.
For the commission to say we are publishing our findings without seeking clarification is false. As stated above, we have written to Zec and it did not respond.
Zec chief elections officer Utoile Silaigwana is trying to deceive the public when he says: "The commission has a duty to protect voters' information which they supplied in confidence".
There is no such provision in the Electoral Act and voters should be aware that any detail supplied to Zec is available in the public domain since the voters roll is a public document that anyone is entitled to access and inspect.
Zec's claim that it is only accountable to Parliament is also false. The Electoral Act requires Zec to keep voters and the general public informed.
One such way to do that is to gazette any changes it makes to the voters roll which have not expressly been requested by the voter.
Zec has never gazetted a list of the changes it made.
It is also regrettable that Zec continues to disown its own voters roll. All the anomalies we are picking in what Zec claims to be a fake, tampered with roll, are reflected on its own BVR inspection site. Does that mean it is also using a fake voters roll on its
website?
We would also like to correct an error which you have made in your articles when quoting the 170 000 addresses which have been edited.
By "edited", we mean that the address has been changed in some way - sometimes a suburb which was missing has been added, sometimes a spelling error was corrected. Some of these edits are genuine corrections, while others are not.
We have also personally sent it requests for various information which it has ignored. (We had asked for a full list of candidates from the January 26 nomination court, as well as a full list of accredited observers for the March 26 by-elections). Zec has not responded to our request.
Team Pachedu has taken care to censor as much information identifying voters as possible in tweets to protect the identities of voters.
This also puts us in a difficult position where the general public cannot verify some of our claims for themselves on the Zec BVR site because we block names and ID numbers as much as possible, while still trying to prove our point.
For the commission to say we are publishing our findings without seeking clarification is false. As stated above, we have written to Zec and it did not respond.
Zec chief elections officer Utoile Silaigwana is trying to deceive the public when he says: "The commission has a duty to protect voters' information which they supplied in confidence".
Zec's claim that it is only accountable to Parliament is also false. The Electoral Act requires Zec to keep voters and the general public informed.
One such way to do that is to gazette any changes it makes to the voters roll which have not expressly been requested by the voter.
Zec has never gazetted a list of the changes it made.
It is also regrettable that Zec continues to disown its own voters roll. All the anomalies we are picking in what Zec claims to be a fake, tampered with roll, are reflected on its own BVR inspection site. Does that mean it is also using a fake voters roll on its
website?
We would also like to correct an error which you have made in your articles when quoting the 170 000 addresses which have been edited.
By "edited", we mean that the address has been changed in some way - sometimes a suburb which was missing has been added, sometimes a spelling error was corrected. Some of these edits are genuine corrections, while others are not.
Source - NewsDay Zimbabwe
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