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Soldiers and police officers forced to vote under supervision
Tichaona Sibanda, SW Radio Africa
March 20, 2008

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803200933.html

Over 75 000 members of the country's security forces have already cast their votes, in an exercise that has been a closely guarded secret, according to information received by the MDC.

In Bulawayo most police officers were allegedly forced to vote several times, while in Mutare soldiers were ordered to write their force numbers on the back of their ballot papers.

Eddie Cross, the MDC's policy advisor for the Tsvangirai formation and their parliamentary candidate for Bulawayo South, told us on Thursday that the issue of postal votes would be as controversial as the 2002 presidential elections. 'The Zimbabwe Election Commission has said only the police force has requested 8000 postal votes. To our surprise, we have information that postal votes, cast and sealed, are over 75 000. Where have the rest come from?' asked Cross.

When the issue of postal votes was raised during a ZEC briefing on Monday, its chairman George Chiweshe said only the police force had requested them. There was no mention of any other section of the security forces having had access to postal votes.

'We have no problem with members of the armed forces and diplomats voting in advance, but we worry when the whole exercise is held in secrecy and we get information that they are forced to vote for a particular candidate,' Cross said.

The MDC plans to go to court to force the ZEC to disclose the actual number of postal votes sent out to the security forces. In 2002 there was a similar problem with the postal votes, which increased Mugabe's electoral votes, in comparison to Tsvangirai's.

Cross said; 'We didn't know how many they were (postal ballots) or where they had come from but what we know is they were used to make sure Mugabe had more votes that Tsvangirai.'

MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai claimed on Thursday that the ZEC ordered between 600 000 and 900 000 postal votes to be printed by Fidelity Printers. This a far larger number than the total of the country's armed forces, whose strength is army 35,000, police 40,000, airforce 4,000 and the prisons service 3,000. Diplomats posted outside the country account for another 200. Out of these 82,000 members of the armed forces and diplomats only about 20,000 are eligible to use the postal votes.

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