/ 26 July 2013

Zim gets fewer choices, more candidates

Zim Gets Fewer Choices, More Candidates

The presidency, two houses of Parliament, provincial councils and local authorities.

A new system agreed by all parties in the new Constitution swells the number of the lower house of assembly to include 60 female candidates, who will be chosen by the parties based on the number of votes won.

Each voter entering the polling station will be asked to vote for the president, the lower house of assembly and the local council. Voters are required to vote in their local ward, and cannot vote elsewhere.

There are 210 seats to be contested in Parliament, and the 60 female candidates will be hand-picked by each party, based on "proportional representation". It is that system that will also see parties select senators (for the upper house) and provincial council representatives.

According to legal watchdog Veritas, this system imposes choices on voters: "For example, a voter who likes party A's constituency candidate for the National Assembly but dislikes the party's candidates for the Senate will have to vote for those candidates willy-nilly or else forgo voting for the constituency candidate.

"Whether all voters will understand that their vote for a constituency candidate will also be counted in three other elections is perhaps more doubtful," says Veritas.

Voters have lost the right to choose between different candidates for different elected bodies. As Veritas puts it, parties will present voters with "packages" of candidates who must be voted for en bloc.

About 6.4-million people are on the voters' roll, according to registrar general Tobaiwa Mudede, who manages voter registration. Between June and July, 747 000 first-time voters registered. The Movement for Democratic Change says many more were unable to do so, due to administrative blunders by Mudede's office.

According to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, eight million ballots have been printed for the 6.4-million voters. The difference between the number of ballots and registered voters is to ensure that ballots do not run out.

Ballots have already been distributed to six of the country's 10 provinces, avoiding the chaos that hit the earlier "special vote", in which ­ballots were not delivered on time.

According to the law, full results should be released within five days of the poll. In 2008, it took more than a month for the full results to be made public. This dented the credibility of the outcome. Each polling station will post its vote tally publicly, a system that allows parties and observers to draw up independent tallies of the national vote.

Polling will take place over a day, which some activists say is not enough. Counting begins immediately after polls close, with official tallies being sent to a national "command centre" in Harare, where tallies from various centres will be "verified" before the electoral commission's director of elections announces results.