The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission says there are no ghost voters on its roll and no duplications either and those spreading these falsehoods are doing so to discredit a good voters’ roll and in the process cause unnecessary panic and despondency.
ZEC chair Priscillah Chigumba said her commission checked all the alleged ghosts and is satisfied that the voters who have the same names and date of births are unique individuals with unique photographs and fingerprints.
“The commission would be grateful to show the records of these individuals to stakeholders,” she said. “The commission therefore cannot disenfranchise them.”
“The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission welcomes factual information that will strengthen the electoral process. However, the spreading of falsehoods and exaggerations solely for the purpose of sensationalism does not benefit the country and is strongly discouraged.”
She said in compiling the voters’ roll, 31 248 duplicates were identified and removed while 39 892 transfers were effected.
Only 8 146 people that had registered as voters but were now dead were removed from the voters’ roll but their names are on the exclusion list.
Some 1 667 cases of duplicate ID numbers are still under investigation and are on the exclusion list.
On ghost voters, Chigumba said some of the analysts claiming to have found ghost voters were comparing the 2013 voters’ roll and the 2018 roll. This was fundamentally flawed, she argued.
“In 2017 the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission made a bold decision to compile a new voters’ roll for the 2018 Harmonised Elections because of the shortcomings of the 2013 voters’ roll which stakeholders had brought to the attention of the commission,” she said.
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