The Sunday Mail
Justice Rita Makarau
Demarcation of polling station-specific areas, which started in 2016, will dominate the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s 2017 Work Plan.
The process is the foundation of voter-registration, and should be complete by this April, with the final maps that will be used in registration drawn up.
In addition, we are procuring biometric registration kits – a process that started in December 2016 when we flighted an advertisement inviting bids.
Bidding closed on January 17, 2017, and a technical committee is now evaluating bids with a view to submitting recommendations to us within the next 14 days.
Thereafter, we will ask the top three bidders to demonstrate how their equipment is user-friendly in our environment.
Things to consider include battery life (because some areas have no electricity); how compact their equipment is (because we will have to carry some of the equipment to rural areas) and how easy it is for our people to use the equipment.
We will sign a contract with the successful bidder once we are satisfied with these aspects.
Another issue ZEC will consider is how quickly the supplier can provide the equipment. A bidder could need, say, six months to supply the equipment. We don’t have that kind of time.
So, there are quite a number of things to establish before we select an appropriate vendor.
We hope to have the equipment in early April to allow us to start voter-registration, which, according our calculations, should take us up to November.
Twelve companies, some of them Zimbabwean-owned and others from Israel, Canada and Belgium, showed interest.
We hope local business wins the tender, but it should be on merit and not just because they are Zimbabwean companies.
Voters should register and inspect the voters’ roll so that come end of 2017, Zimbabwe has a roll ready for use in 2018.
Running simultaneously with voter-registration will be public education campaigns on the biometric voter-registration system. There appears to be confusion and ignorance among some members of the public regarding this system.
It is being confused with electronic voting, which is used in countries like Namibia and India that have electronic voting machines.
In the case of electronic voting, people cast their ballots via a machine.
It is also possible that people are confusing biometric voter-registration with decoding information in our data centre by using a fingerprint.
When you present yourself, you will not have to present a passport or an ID, but simply use your fingerprints. This is not technology we envisage to use in 2018, but on a much later date.
In 2018, we will use technology to record voters’ details.
The technology carries an added advantage in that it de-duplicates multiple registrants.
If you try to register using different names or addresses, your biometric data – your digital photograph and fingerprints – will tell us that you are the same person.
That is a very strong feature and one of the reasons we went for biometric voter-registration. ZEC also went for this system as only those who present themselves will appear on the voters’ roll.
Therefore, issues regarding “dead voters” will not cloud the integrity of our voters’ roll because only those who are able to present themselves physically will be registered.
Furthermore, Zec will towards the end of 2017, take stock of election material (tents, gas lamps and other election hardware). This is necessary as all logistics should be ready once the election is proclaimed.
Budget
ZEC has been giving Treasury what I would want to call piece-meal budgets in the sense that we can only give them a budget for 2017 and that budget excludes things that we would want to do in 2018.
We are still discussing with Treasury; I wouldn’t want to jeopardise these discussions by putting out figures in the public domain at this stage.
Election date
The law provides that we must fill any vacancy in the Legislature within 90 days of its emergence unless the vacancy arises nine months before a general election.
So, going by the time we expect elections to be held at the latest – perhaps around the same time we held them in 2013 – we move back 10 months from July.
It would be safe for us to conclude by-elections around October 2017.
We don’t have a date for the 2018 general election as it will be proclaimed by His Excellency, the President. We are simply going by the latest possible date, which is the date we held the last general election in 2013.
The law provides that if a vacancy occurs nine months before a general election, then you don’t fill that seat, but wait for a general election.
But our nine months in Zimbabwe are not fixed in law because the election date is not fixed in law.
So, the latest that we will have elections is around the time we had elections in 2013. Therefore, if you roll back nine months, you are looking at October this year.
It’s just our own estimation, which is not guided by anything concrete.
Demarcation
We have started off by using polling stations that we used in 2013; that is the basis.
And then we are defining a catchment area for that polling station.
For instance, if Sakubva High School in Mutare was a polling station in 2013, we will then demarcating an area around the school, looking at how many households we think can constitute up to 1 000 to 1 500 voters and that will constitute a polling area for the purpose of using that polling station.
Voters should not travel a distance of more than 5km to get to a polling station. We will try to establish another polling station and demarcate the area the minute one is outside the 5km radius.
It’s a mini delimitation exercise; save that we are not changing ward or constituency boundaries that were put in place by the last Delimitation Commission of 2008.
Justice Rita Makarau is the Chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. She shared these views with The Sunday Mail’s Chief Reporter Kuda Bwititi and Senior Reporter Lincoln Towindo in Harare on January 24, 2017.
