Zim voters roll ‘has thousands of ghost voters’

Peta Thorncroft

HARARE: A privately-owned Zimbabwe newspaper has claimed that the new voters roll which will be used for elections at month end has more then 250000 “ghost” voters on it.

The Zimbabwe voters roll with more than 5.6 million voters is, for the first time, electronically checkable, and was created by the Zimbabwe Election Commission using fingerprints and facial photographs to prove the identities of those on the roll. All those registered had to also provide proof of their residential addresses and identity cards.

According to Newsday, the software used to create the voters roll failed to avoid re-duplication of some of the data, which it said led to the massive number of ghost voters.

Electoral commission chairperson Priscilla Chigumba said the claims were “fictitious”. She said “several techniques were used to sift through all the 5 683 936 records in the voters roll”.

Newsday reported that the number of “red-flagged entries stood at 250000… the high number of irregularities unearthed showed duplication of identity numbers with different names, or slight changes to spellings; similar ID numbers; and in some instances, the same person registered at different polling stations in the same constituency”.

This was, the newspaper said, “a serious threat to (the) electoral process because the elections shall be polling-station based, and any person registered at two different polling stations will be able to vote twice”. Independent election organisations such as the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network and the Elections Resource Centre told Newsday they had not completed their investigations of the roll.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims it was cheated of victory in previous elections through intimidation of voters and rigging by Zanu-PF which included the voters roll. – Independent Foreign Service