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An audit of Zimbabwe's 2013 voters' roll
Research and Advocacy Unit
July 16, 2013

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Executive summary

This is the second report on an audit of the June 2013 Voters’ Roll. It expands on the previous report, provides a more detailed analysis of the Roll, and corrects a number of minor errors.

A number of key findings merged from the audit:

1. That there are nearly 2 000 000 potential voters aged under 30 who are unregistered.

Very few adults aged under 30 are registered. This is most marked in the 18 -19 age band, where only 8.87% are registered. In numerical terms, this means that a total of 1 920 424 people under the age of 30 ought to be registered as voters but are not.2 This is almost 29% of the total adult population of 6 647 779. Since there are unregistered people in the other age bands, the total percentage of the entire adult population who ought to be registered as voters but are not, is considerably higher than 29%.

2. That there are well over 1 000 000 people on the roll who are either deceased or departed.

If one removes the 1 920 424 unregistered potential voters from the calculation, the registration rate rises to an impossible 129% of people aged 30 and over. If an 85% registration rate is assumed, then over registration rate rises to 52% for these age bands, representing some 1 732 527 names which are on the roll but ought not to be. In other words, rather than the some 5 874 115 entries on the roll there should not be more than 4 141 588.

3. That 63 constituencies have more registered voters than inhabitants.

This was covered in the Preliminary report and the full details of those Constituencies with more voters than inhabitants according to the 2012 Census is given in Appendix 2 of this report.

4. That 41 Constituencies deviate from the average number of voters per constituency by more than the permitted 20%.

This was also reported in the preliminary report, but here is expanded. The report points out a number of problems:

• Whilst delimitation has been fixed according to the 2008 specifications, there are three local government authorities [RDCs] that have been created from existing wards for which re-delimitation is necessary, but not constitutionally possible;
• One Ward in one of these new RDC’s has only eight voters according to Voters’ Roll;
• There appears to be no political bias in the distribution of the over and under-registered Constituencies, but it is also clear that there is discrimination against urban constituencies. Mbare, for example, has three times more registered voters than Chipinge East, which should mean that Mbare should have one and a half seats to Chipinge East’s half seat.

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