We’re ready for by-elections
Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) spokesperson, Commissioner JOYCE
KAZEMBE (JK), recently spoke to our reporter, DEBRA MATABVU (DM), about the Commission’s preparations for next year’s by-elections, among other issues. Below are excerpts from the interview.
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DM: How far has the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission gone in preparing for next year’s by-elections?
JK:
We are adequately prepared for next year’s by-elections. We have been prepared for quite some time now.
We had to postpone the holding of the by-elections, and this was not because of financial resources.
So, the necessary logistics are in place and we are in a position to hold by-elections even as we speak.
If things change, and we are asked to move dates to tomorrow, we will be able to hold the by-elections. So, financially we are prepared.
DM: How much has ZEC budgeted for the exercise, and how much has been released by Treasury?
JK: We had budgeted and wanted $1 067 824 595, however, the funds are being released in batches and what has been released to us so far is $61 949 891. We are ready financially, we have never had problems financially.
DM: ZEC recently postponed a planned voter registration blitz to allow for the Registrar General’s office to conduct a nationwide civic registration exercise. When should we expect the blitz to commence?
JK: We had actually planned to go on a blitz from this month (December), and then break for Christmas and continue after the break.
We hoped that by then, we would have covered quite an area. We have 900 mobile voter registration units, and we would have gone on a blitz all over the country, making sure that the kits get to as close to the people as possible. That is what we had planned to do.
However, when we go to register our catchment area, we assume that people over there have national identity cards or valid passports or the green waiting pass.
However, our intention now is to catch the young ones, the youths that recently turned 18, and are due for voting. For them to be eligible to vote, they have to have national identity cards. We then realised that quite a number of the youths did not have these documents.
Normally, we work hand-in-glove with the Registrar General’s office on issues to do with identity, but they had a challenge of getting the inputs that they require.
Since our focus was on the youth, we thought it did not make economic sense to go before these are issued.
So, we postponed the blitz to maybe end of January early February, thereabout, in the hope that by then the RG would have gone before us.
It is important for us to catch the youth, because if we do not catch them now, it means they will lose the opportunity. Incidentally, the RG will be issuing identity documents to 16-year-olds and by 2023 they will be 18 years and due for voting. Our intention is that once the RG is through, at the end of January we should be going for the blitz. In any case, there are adults that have never had an identity card and we are also catching those.
This is our plan. In terms of when it will commence we anticipate, between the end of January and beginning of March, so that we are in time, hopefully, for the by-elections.
Even if they are not registered for the by-elections, our plan is to have them registered for the next elections.
DM: We have witnessed a recent surge in Covid-19 cases across the country in recent weeks. How will ZEC ensure that its plans for conducting a voter registration exercise and by-elections will not be affected by the pandemic? JK:
Aside from the directives from the Ministry of Health and Child Care, which determine how we behave during periods of the pandemic and the World Health Organisation’s three guidelines, which are: mask up, social distance and sanitise, we cannot hold the by-elections.
We would have held the by-elections, but there is a policy. There is a rule that was announced by the President following the guidelines from the Ministry of Health and Child Care that says we cannot hold elections. When we hold elections, it brings people together and it is very difficult to control people, and we do not know who is Covid-19 positive or not. So, when the time is right, we will be given the directive to continue.
However, this gives us time to prepare, we will need to print the voters’ rolls, and the list of candidates, which we have not done yet.
Currently, we have a number of vacancies both at the national level, which are about 34, and about 113 are within the local authorities.
ZEC has also developed policy guidelines on dealing with elections during the Covid-19 era.
It draws directly from the stated guidelines, as well as from the World Health Organisation. So, we follow those guidelines. However, until the President has proclaimed that it is now safe to do so, we cannot hold the by-elections. We will wait for the proclamation and then we will hold the by-elections.
DM: How far have you gone with the delimitation exercise?
JK: Our estimate currently is that we may have covered 40 percent of the preparatory work, towards the boundary delimitation exercise. What we are doing at the moment is alignment of the polling areas. The polling areas are our voting areas to the census-established enumeration areas.
The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) marks out enumeration areas that are comprised of a number of households, so we will be following that.
We are, however, not going to be doing a delimitation until ZimStat has completed its work, submitted the document to the President, after which they will give feedback if there are any corrections to ZimStat.
After proclamation that is when we begin the delimitation exercise. We have not begun delimitation. We will probably begin it in the last quarter of next year. That will give us time to prepare, hoping during that period most of the ground work will have been done in terms of enumeration areas.
This entails marking the boundaries, where we mark the constituency boundaries and also the local authorities’ areas.
This helps to know the numbers of voters in an area, because we depend on the number of voters, not the population.
The number of voters determines how many polling stations and how large the constituency is. Some may shrink depending on the density, some may expand if people are more spaced out.
All these processes will be taking place during the delimitation exercise. Once we have done that, we begin the process, then we mark the boundaries for the constituencies for the wards as well, because our elections are ward-based.
This means as we are marking these, we are also determining the number of polling stations given that we want to have a maximum of 1 000 per polling station within a ward.
Within a ward, we might have five, six or eight polling stations depending on the catchment area.
So, the delimitation proper work will only start once ZimStat has finished and submitted their report.
DM: Can you give us an outline of ZEC’s roadmap for the delimitation exercise through to the next harmonised elections?
JK: As I indicated before the following will be done: Alignment of polling stations to enumeration areas. I have already talked about that. The polling areas, the wards and the demarcation by ZimStat of how many households constitute an enumeration area.
Then there is the updating of the alpha listing. The alpha listing is the updating of the names on the voters roll alphabetically. Once this has been finished, we are going on the voter registration blitz.
Then there is cleaning the voter’s rolls. This is the role of the RG to give us from time to time, the number of people that have died based on the registrations as dead.
It means when a person dies, we expect the relatives to go to the RG’s office. Not only here, but across the country’s 63 districts, where they can submit a death certificate and our staff cross out the name.
If they do not have a death certificate, they can use a letter from the headman, chief and religious ministers.
There are also offices that are there to help people with difficulties in getting death certificates for their deceased relatives. There are many avenues for people who are having difficulties in getting death certificates.
This is what we call cleaning of the voters roll, removing the people that are deceased from the voters’ rolls.
We have to recruit staff for delimitation and train them. It is very important for one to know what they are doing.
ZEC has over 500 staffers throughout the country, and we will not be able to do the delimitation exercise with the staff we currently have. We need staff from mainly state institutions.
At the same time, we do not delimit boundaries without stakeholder consultations like political parties, civil society organisations, faith-based organisations and traditional figures, among other stakeholders.
All these need to be consulted when we are doing the delimitation processes. After that we delimit the wards, and remember our voting is ward-based. So, we have to delimit the wards based on population. After that, we delimit the constituencies, which can sometimes be a challenge, but we have a formula.
For example, if 1 000 people is the average population per constituency across the country, and we may have a constituency that has doubled, we are allowed to set a constituency with 20 percent more or less than the average.
After we have done that, we come up with a draft report that we send to the President. If the President approves it then the proclamation is made.
We then stop registering. We stop registering six months before elections after the dates have been proclaimed by the President. That is basically what delimitation is all about.
DM: How many new voters were incorporated into the voters roll this year? And how does the registration pattern compare to previous years?
JK:
Just 1 700 citizens registered as voters in 2020, and this year so far, 2 857 citizens registered as voters.
There is an improvement mainly due to awareness by ZEC, the pandemic has been of course one of the reasons for decreased registration. It is very difficult to encourage them to come, however, we have asked them to drop in our provincial offices and district offices across the country, but not as crowds because of the pandemic.
DM: Several missions that observed the last elections came up with varying recommendations in their final reports that will help improve elections in Zimbabwe. Among those were some that zeroed in on how ZEC can improve its election management capabilities and efficiencies. Have you implemented any of those recommendations?
JK:
We always get these recommendations after elections. We had a meeting in Nyanga for those who had observed, foreign and local observers as well as civil society observers, and we took into account the recommendations that they made and we have begun implementing the recommendations through the electoral reforms.
Currently, we are just looking at the submissions from the Parliamentary Committee on Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, since we have been engaging them, they just sent a document with proposed reforms, some of them, which we proposed even in 2013. They are going to go through the document in Mutare.
We have made an input, agreed with them on certain things, but some things we did not agree.
However, when everything is said and done our bible is the Constitution and the respective articles, which govern the organisations.
We are the independent commissions supporting democracy under Chapter 12 of the Constitution, and it lists them.
ZEC is one of the five. It talks about the composition, establishment of ZEC among other issues and also the submission of electoral reports. So, anything that does not go in line with the Constitution we will not be able to do. In addition to this, we also form regulations that guide us on a daily basis.
Quite a number of issues in the Electoral Act need changing, for example, media monitoring.
What we are using currently are the 2008 media regulations, which are highly outdated. We tried last time, it did not work, however, we are hoping this will be amended this time around.
DM: How many political parties are currently listed as genuine political formations with ZEC, and how many of those were registered this year?
JK: There are 176 political parties and these are on our database. This year only 10 were registered. We expect them to increase as we head towards elections.
Actually, we do not register political parties, we do not have that capacity. Political parties present themselves to us. We have been begging Parliament, that they give us a legal provision to register political parties. At least we will be in a position to control and verify if it is a genuine political party.
In South Africa they register political parties, therefore they can hold political parties accountable.
DM: Has ZEC made any proposals to Government to facilitate amendments to the Electoral Act to help streamline the management of elections? If so, what do those proposals entail?
JK: The rolls are now to be prepared for polling station areas, rather than for wards and constituencies, because of that this has changed to voters rolls for polling station areas rather than for wards and constituencies.
According to Section 36 of the Act, alterations to entries must be made in such a way as not to obliterate the original entry. If there is a new entry, you do not cancel that until such a time, and they must also be initialised by the person doing the alteration here at ZEC. This applies to printed rolls, but cannot be applied to electronic rolls.
Then for the visually impaired, we are playing around with the possibility of coming up with a ballot that they can read.
There is also an extension of a postal ballot to everyone who will not be able to vote on voting day. In particular officials on duty, we get a lot of staff from state institutions.
We are also trying to see if we can do that with hospital people, if we can give them postal votes.
We are also seeing if we can do this to people with disabilities, since we have been limiting ourselves to people with no physical challenges. So, we are trying to be as broad as possible.
Like in South Africa, they go to hospitals during voting periods. However, in South Africa, they have no wards to talk about, it is party based, they vote for individuals.
However, when you have a constituency or ward-based, you have to make sure that a particular vote goes to the right constituency. If someone is in hospital, they cannot locate their polling station. So, we will give them a postal vote and we will have a register which says, this person is in hospital, indicating the polling station.
These postal votes will be arranged according to the constituency, polling area and ward. All these details will be in an envelope including the number of ballots that we have, that is, the President, constituency and wards.
These will be sent to the person wherever they will be. There will be indications of how the ballots will be brought here and counted long before everyone else has voted. So that by the time everyone votes, these envelopes should be at the wards the person has indicated so that the vote is not lost.