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Harare cuts voter registration centres
Regerai Marwezu, ZimOnline
November 02, 2007

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=2253

MASVINGO - The government has reduced the number of voter registration centres in the country by over 60 percent amid reports of critical shortage of financial and human resources.

It emerged yesterday that the second phase of the voter registration exercise was not budgeted for, resulting in a last-minute rush to raise the required funds.

The exercise to update the roll ahead of next year's joint presidential and parliamentary elections that was completed last August had to be extended last Friday after complaints mostly from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party that thousands of newly eligible voters from areas it controls were left out.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) yesterday confirmed that not all registration centres had been reopened for the mop-up exercise that began last Friday.

"We are busy working flat out so that some of the traditional centres which did not open are opened before the end of the exercise", said ZEC spokesman Utoille Silaigwana.

The extended voter registration exercise runs until mid-November.

Sources said urban and rural constituencies seen as opposition strongholds were hardest hit by the reduction of mobile registration centres.

In Masvingo province, only 90 registration centres re-opened when the exercise was extended compared to more than 200 centres that operated in the province's 14 constituencies during the first phase that ended in August.

Just one centre is serving Masvingo urban, home to more than 500 000 people.
"The problem is not in Masvingo alone but is countrywide where over half of the centres are yet to open," Silaigwana told ZimOnline.

He noted that a critical shortage of funds had affected the electoral body's ability to hire personnel.

Sources said officers hired for the exercise were getting an allowance of $400 000 a day and some teachers normally hired during such times had refused citing poor remuneration.
Zimbabweans go to watershed polls early next year to choose a president and members of parliament.

The MDC has already written to ZEC demanding the convening of an all-party meeting to agree "practical approaches" to the registration of voters to avoid mistakes made in a previous exercise to record voters.

Zimbabwe's voters' roll has been in shambles for years with hundreds of thousands of names of voters who died or left the country to live abroad still appearing on the register, while thousands more voters have failed to vote in previous polls either because their names were entered in wrong constituencies or did not appear at all on the register.

President Robert Mugabe's government has been accused of rigging elections by manipulating the voters' roll.

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