SW Radio Africa news - The Independent Voice of Zimbabwe
There are increasing fears that plans are afoot to rig the upcoming July 31st poll in Robert Mugabe’s favour, with more evidence of serious irregularities in the formation of the voters roll.
Already there have been concerns raised that the voters roll is being manipulated, in an effort to allegedly swell the ZANU PF vote in three weeks time. The most serious allegations have come from the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai who has said that a Harare based company, Nikuv, was giving technical support to ZANU PF to manipulate the voters’ roll.
More concerns were then raised by the party’s Secretary General Tendai Biti during a press conference on Wednesday, where he detailed the irregularities of the voter registration exercise.
The Daily News elections map
Biti said Wednesday that he believes the voters roll has “become the major theatre of shenanigans in terms of the election.
“In 2008 it was violence , coercion and intimidation. In 2013 ZANU PF has pushed gear and gone to the desktop and keyboard in manipulating the people’s will,” Biti said.
He went on to explain major issues, like the widespread misinformation of the location of voter registration centres and the slow pace of officials in registering people. He said that in Harare alone over 300,000 people failed to register. Biti also raised concern that there are ‘multiple’ voters rolls in circulation, showing different and often incorrect information for voters. He suggested that the registration process should be extended, at least until next Friday, to try and ensure that the rights of Zimbabweans are protected.
More irregularities have been seen in a new online elections ‘map’ put together by the Daily News newspaper, which shows a visual representation of registered voters per province using official figures from Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede. The map also shows party ‘strongholds’, with the MDC-T allegedly having a wider support base.
The map also shows more irregularities, which the Daily News does not comment on, in terms of the discrepancies between the number of registered voters in some provinces and the adult population figures. For example, according to the map, in Mashonaland East there are just over 695,000 adults, but somehow over 700,000 people have registered to vote. This is also the case in Matabeleland South and the Midlands, where the number of registered voters is higher that the adult population.
This corroborates a report recently released by the Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU), which last week revealed ‘disturbing’ discrepancies between the latest voters’ roll and the population census. The report showed there are 63 constituencies out of 210 with more ‘registered’ voters than the number of inhabitants indicated by the recent population census.
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