via Voters’ roll watch | The Zimbabwean 2 July 2014
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has responded to a High Court application by a constitutional lawyer, Justice Mavedzenge, who wants it to publicise the voters’ roll. ZEC said Mavedzenge approached the wrong court.
“They are arguing that the High Court has no jurisdiction to hear my matter. Instead, ZEC says that the matter should go to the Electoral Court,” said Mavedzenge.
Despite that, Mavedzenge, at the time of going to print, was finalising a summary of his arguments in response to ZEC. He is insisting that the matter is not entirely an election issue, but heavily weighs on his rights as a Zimbabwean citizen.
“As precedents show, the High Court has jurisdiction to deal with human rights issues and must therefore hear my case,” added Mavedzenge.
He added: “This is an important matter as it seeks to ensure that a government department adopts and upholds a culture of accountability.
The voters’ roll is a public document that I and other citizens must have access to.”
Mavedzenge recently applied to the High Court to force ZEC to publicly avail the electronic voters’ roll, which the commission has kept under wraps, claiming that its machines have broken down.
COMMENTS
There is a need to understand the issues here, any one can get a hard copy electoral roll.
What they want is a copy of the master electronic one.
With this terrorists and criminals can alter same to disrupt any election.
As usual journalists support the terrorist point of view.
Oh really? Why don’t you just ask them for an electronic one? Tell them you just want a digital COPY, not the master one. Then you report back to us and share it with us all. If you’re right, you’ll have it within a day because electronic copies are free and transferrable instantly, right?
There is a need to understand the issues here. The ZEC wants to only distribute printed hard copies made from a digital list because they can then deny access by claiming that their printer is still busted. So even if they say that a copy is available, it’s not. Also the single hard copies that were distributed to the political parties on the very day of the July 3013 elections was thousands of pages long and not in a searchable format. It would take months to re-enter the data from the printed copy back into a usable digital format. ZEC want to make it as hard as possible for citizens to check if their name appears in a different ward, in multiple wards, or does not appear at all.
There is, or was, a complete digital voters roll. It does exist. It’s impossible to declare a victor of an election if you do not know who actually voted. Therefore, since ZEC declared a victor, there absolutely is an electronic voters roll. Otherwise, the only other conclusion is that they lied and Mugabe and ZANU-PF didn’t actually win the election last year. Until they release the roll, there is no proof that they are entitled to rule.
The issue is that the voters roll is a digital document that the ZEC and ZANU-PF do not want to be seen by anyone other then the riggers – and they will stall, and stall some more and offer the lamest of excuses to deny access to the public, but until they come clean no one trusts them and both the people and foreign investors will do whatever they can to avoid dealing with this government.
Machines? Shouldn’t that be machine, singular? I’m told they do most of their sums using their fingers and toes and sometimes they forget.
HOw on earth can ZEC’s machines all coveniently break down. The absence of a voter’s roll is both a provocation and an insult to the people of Zimbabwe