The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) expects the
provisional voters’ roll to be out by early April and is cleaning up the data
collected during the registration blitz to weed out double registrants and
ensuring the correct allocation of polling stations to prospective voters.
This was said by ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba
during a stakeholders meeting with the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on
Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and organisations that had petitioned
Parliament on concerns over electoral issues.
ZEC conducted a registration blitz between August and
February this year and registered over 5,3 million people under the Biometric
Voter Registration.
“At the moment, we are in the process of ensuring that
everyone has been allocated the correct polling station and that everybody’s
names are spelt correctly,” said Justice Chigumba.
“Once that has been done and after cleaning up of the data,
we need to do what is called de-duplication, which is using fingerprints to
weed out double registrants.
“Now, the credibility of this voters’ roll is going to
hinge on the authenticity of that process.”
Justice Chigumba said they would not rush the process to
ensure that they produced a credible voters’ roll.
“We will not hurry that process because we need to produce
a credible voters’ roll,” she said.
“We need to clean up the data, we need to weed out double
registrants and that process takes time, so will not be getting those
statistics within the next two weeks, but maybe within a month or six weeks we
will have finished the processes.”
Justice Chigumba said the majority of people registered
during the BVR blitz were young.
“According to our preliminary statistics after the BVR
registration blitz, about 60 percent of our registered voters are aged between
18 to 40,” she said.
Justice Chigumba said they had been allocated $98 million
from the $148 million they had asked from Treasury. “We appreciate all the efforts made by Government and
Treasury to avail resources,” she said.
“ZEC had submitted a budget of about $148 million to fund
the elections and Treasury has committed to giving ZEC $98 million. There is a
budget deficit and ZEC can only do that which is possible to do within the
limited funds that it has.”
Justice Chigumba told the gathering that there were no
serving military personnel or other security departments employed by ZEC.
“We are not precluded from recruiting former members of the
security sector provided they are retired and not active,” she said.
“We have less than 15 percent of those, but yes they are in
the ZEC, but I will hasten to say most of those retired from their institutions
five, six, seven years ago and we have not had any recent recruitments because
of the recruitment freeze.” Herald
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