The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has denied responsibility for the messy voters’ roll and accused political parties instead.
The electoral body said political parties issued their supporters affidavits with similar addresses during the voter registration exercise resulting in about 40 people, according to Team Pachedu, being sometimes registered under one residential address.
ZEC however denied being responsible for the anomaly.
Pressure groups and opposition political parties have been highly critical of ZEC after discrepancies were identified in the voters’ roll to be used in the March 26 by-elections.
Data experts studying the voters’ roll have unearthed several other anomalies on the voters’ roll, among them names of 3 253 people aged 100 years or more, including 11 who are older than the oldest known surviving person on earth in the Guinness World Book of Records.
This has led to suspicions ZEC was plotting to rig the elections in favour of the ruling party, ZANU PF.
However, in a statement Friday, ZEC disowned the voters’ roll which was recently leaked, saying the document was tampered with intentions to discredit the elections management body.
ZEC chief elections officer Utoile Silaigwana spoke on the anomalies:
Some politicians are the chief culprits of this problem. The commission has now and again deliberated on this issue in our multi-party liaison committees, but to no avail.
They are the ones who facilitate their supporters to be registered and some of them have been doing so during the current voter registration blitz and have set up desks where they commission affidavits for their supporters for presentation to our registration officers as proof of residence.
Our registration is done offline and there is no way the commission can tell that there is a high number of people who have registered under the same address.
Silaigwana said the commission did not have the capacity to determine whether the addresses provided were genuine or not.
In separate interviews with NewZimbabwe.com, ZANU PF, Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC) and MDC Alliance denied the accusations.
In other news – Former PG Kumbirai Hodzi Suffers Double Stroke
Former Prosecutor General (PG) Kumbirai Hodzi was reportedly forced to resign by officials from the President and Cabinet (OPC) and senior officials from the Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs for alleged incompetence and corruption.
New Zimbabwe reported official and security sources as saying Hodzi had been under pressure since December last year when a dossier, accusing him of corruption and incompetence, was submitted to the OPC and Justice ministry. Learn More
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