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Codelia Mondela and Walter Mswazie, Chronicle Reporters
THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) will open the country’s Provisional Voters’ Roll for inspection by the public from May 19 to 29 in preparation for the forthcoming 2018 elections amid reports that about 5 000 voters registered under the BVR system have died.

The electoral body has said its foolproof system would ensure that by election time the names of all deceased people would have been removed from the voters roll.

Zec’s Acting Chief Elections Officer Mr Utoile Silaigwana said in a statement yesterday that the Commission would shortly publicise the manner in which inspection would be done. “The purpose of the Provisional Voters’ Roll inspection is to allow members of the public to check if their details were correctly captured and if not, have anomalies corrected. Once all the corrections have been taken on board, the Commission will then produce the final Voters’ Roll that will be used in the forthcoming harmonised elections,” Mr Silaigwana said.

He urged members of the public to inspect the Voters’ Roll and said the Commission would open inspection centres at polling stations which would be published in the media and Zec’s website.

“The Commission urges all members of the public to take a keen interest in this important process by coming out in large numbers to inspect the Voters’ Roll. The Provisional Voters’ Roll may undoubtedly contain some errors and therefore, registrants are urged to go and inspect their details to avoid disappointment on polling day,” he said.

Meanwhile, speaking at a Zimbabwe Union of Journalists (ZUJ) election reporting workshop at a Masvingo hotel on Friday, Zimbabwe Electoral Commission deputy Commissioner Emmanuel Magadi said at least 5 000 registered voters have passed on before the completion of Biometric Voters’ registration exercise. “By the time the country goes for elections, the names of the deceased would have been removed from the roll,” said Mr Magadi.

He dismissed allegations that Zec was deliberately removing registered voters’ names from the voters roll and challenged the media to visit the commission’s officers to verify things they do not understand well.

“Our system is foolproof that when one dies today, we will know it and remove the name from the voters roll. We get this information from the Department of Registry where relatives of the deceased acquire death certificates. So far, it has come to our attention that 5 000 of those who have registered under BVR, have died,” said Mr Magadi.

He said no person would be removed from the voters roll without any valid reason.

“At no time will Zec remove any name unless the person is registered twice. We have situations whereby some people were registering under two or more wards during the ongoing BVR and we will address this through contacting the voter over the matter. We will ask him or her which ward will he/she want to use for voting purposes.

“We urge the media to be fair and accurate in their reportage. We tend to have challenges with this system because it is a new system altogether to be used by Zimbabwe. However, in all fairness, we have not had many challenges with this system like before,” Mr Magadi said.

Last week, at the electoral body’s Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) stand, Zec’s chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba said the 2018 elections could not be rigged as the country’s voting system was foolproof.

“The BVR system is tamper-proof for the simple reason that the data that we collected is housed in something called the consolidation server. The consolidation server contains the master server that contains all the information and we then have other servers which we are using to connect that data. Those servers have very strict protection files. They’re very strict un-hackable access level passwords that are tamper free,” said Justice Chigumba.

She said Zec had started de-duplicating of BVR data which entails cleaning double registrants from the voters’ roll.

Justice Chigumba explained how the BVR data was being stored in one main consolidation server which is tamper proof with two other servers that have a strict firewall being used to duplicate and clean the data.

According to Zec data as at April 19 this year, 5 428 660 people had registered to vote under the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) exercise. Of the total number of registrants, 2 946 826 are women while 2 481 834 are men.

Harare Metropolitan Province had the highest number of registrants at 849 834 while Bulawayo had the lowest 238 302.

Matabeleland South has the second least number of registrants, 249 770 followed by Matabeleland North with 326 862.

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