ZEC Urges Zimbabweans To Assist In Removing Ghost Voters

“If dead people are not removed from the voters roll or nobody goes and register them as dead they will remain on the voters roll because the Registrar General has no legal authority to remove anyone until somebody comes with an affidavit that this person is dead,” said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC)’s Deputy Chairperson, Joyce Kazembe on Tuesday.

“We are very worried and it is always a worry,” she said adding that as long as the ghost voters existed this will undermine the credibility of any future polls.

She said there were a lot of dead people on the voters roll because there were no incentives for people to come and remove them. Her organisation was moving towards total management of the country’s voters roll, currently the prerogative of the Registrar General, Tobaiwa Mudede.

Kazembe said her organisation wants total independence in the management of funds to run elections and no longer want them to be channelled through the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs. ZEC requires $220 million to run the constitutional referendum and elections in 2012.

“There has been a question that we wish we would have our funding direct from a parliamentary vote. It is something that we have talked about. We would also want to move away from being supervised using the executive as a conduit. That is what we are advocating for,” said Kazembe.