18 000 deceased voters struck off roll

Source: 18 000 deceased voters struck off roll | The Herald

Herald Reporter
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) struck off the voters’ roll, more than 18 000 deceased people  between January and December last year.

ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba said the process of removing deceased persons from the voters’ roll was being done in collaboration with the registrar of births and deaths.

Justice Chigumba said this in ZEC’s 2019 annual report that was tabled last week in the National Assembly by Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi.

“In line with the constitutional mandate to maintain the voters’ roll the commission systematically removed deceased registered voters from the voters roll at periodic intervals. The deceased registered voters’ records were extracted from lists of adults aged 18 years and above received from the Registrar General (RG)’s office who passed on between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. The total number of the deceased registered voters removed in 2019 stood at 18 586,” said Justice Chigumba.

She said they were conducting voter education at tertiary institutions given that the bulk of voting youths were at colleges and universities.

“The youth constitute about 60 percent of registered voters in Zimbabwe. Researches indicate that the Zimbabwean tertiary institutions accommodate about 37 percent of the registered voters of ages between 18-35 years. This was the basis on which the Commission sought to establish a collaborative framework with tertiary institutions as a way of harnessing the youth component. Partnerships were developed with institutions of higher learning to facilitate the provision of voter education and information from a civic perspective,” said Justice Chigumba.

She said following the successful establishment of the ICT network infrastructure linking all commission’s offices online export of biometric voter registration data was successfully implemented last year.

“To this end all biometric voter registration kits used for continuous registration were exporting BVR data automatically/online uploading into the Consolidation Server as soon as a voter was registered,” she said.

In another report, the Judicial Service Commission said the runaway inflation has taken a toll on civil cases and small claims courts as few cases have been recorded.

JSC chairperson, Justice Luke Malaba said this in his annual report that was tabled in the National Assembly.

“The number of small claims filed went down from 12 879 in 2018 to 7 947 during the period under review. This could be as a result of the fact that the jurisdiction of the small claims courts has been rendered negligible by inflationary pressures obtaining in the economy,” said Justice Malaba.

He said the magistrates courts handled 101 028 criminal cases countrywide compared to 100 201 cases in 2018.

“The rise in cases is attributed to the spate of public violence cases witnessed at the beginning of 2019 as well as the armed illegal miners arrested towards the close of the year. The decrease in domestic violence cases is notable,” said Justice Malaba.