THE MDC says ZANU PF takes advantage of flawed voters' roll to rig elections

By Wayne Mafaro 

HARARE – Zimbabwe’s main opposition party has asked the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to convene an all-party meeting to agree “practical approaches” to the registration of voters to avoid mistakes made in a previous exercise to record voters. 

Zimbabwe’s voters’ roll has been in shambles for years with hundreds of thousands of names of voters who died or left the country to live abroad still appearing on the register, while thousands more voters have failed to vote in previous polls either because their names were entered in wrong constituencies or did not appear at all on the register. 

An exercise to update the roll ahead of next year’s joint presidential and parliamentary elections that was completed last August had to be extended last Friday after complaints mostly from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party that thousands of newly eligible voters from areas it controls were left out. 

“We request formally that you call a meeting of the Multiparty Liaison Committee to agree more practical approaches to the voter registration challenge generally and the mobile exercise in particular,” MDC’s director of elections in the Morgan Tsvangirai-led party, Ian Makone, wrote in a letter to the ZEC dated October 25. 

“We are convinced that the initiatives recently announced by the Registrar General will yield the same poor results as the last one. We need to learn from our mistakes and we do not seem to have done so," Makone wrote. 

Makone, who wants the multiparty committee to discuss issues such as civic education and a publicity campaign to raise voter awareness of the extended registration exercise, told ZimOnline that the MDC was not happy with preparations for next year’s polls particularly the way voter registration was being done. 

ZEC chief elections officer Lovemore Sekeramayi refused to answer questions on the matter. 

Election observers have always criticised Zimbabwe’s chaotic voters’ roll, while the MDC has in the past accused the government of taking advantage of the lack of accurate figures on the number of voters to rig polls. The government denies rigging elections. 

The MDC and ZANU PF are engaged in talks under South African mediation that are aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis. A key objective of the talks is to ensure next year’s polls are free and fair. 

Analysts say South African President Thabo Mbeki should push Harare to end political violence, repeal tough security and press laws as well as fix the chaotic voters’ roll if next year’s polls are to be free and fair. - ZimOnline