Preventing Electoral Fraud report SAIRR May 11 ... - AfricanLiberty.org

General by an individual who was in fact acting for the MDC. However, the
Registrar-General quickly realised what had happened. Hence, when additional
copies were requested, all further sales of such material were blocked by him.
April 2002 A High Court application by the MDC to have the roll, as used in
the 2002 presidential election, released in digital format was rejected. 7
The MDC's application to acquire the presidential voters' roll then went to the
Supreme Court, and was ultimately denied in a poorly reasoned judgment. Mr
Justice J Friedman, acting as an Independent Observer on behalf of the Forum for
Barristers and Advocates of the International Bar Association, found “the
judgment of the Supreme Court...fundamentally flawed”, adding: “The outcome
of the appeal can therefore....only be described as highly unsatisfactory.” 8
February 2005 An application by the MDC for the voters' roll in digital format
for the imminent 2005 general election was denied.
These successive efforts created considerable bad publicity and embarrassment
for the Zanu-PF regime. Hence, in early 2008 the law was changed to allow a
voters' roll to be supplied in digital format to political parties and interested NGOs
prior to an election. This proved of great significance when Zimbabwe in 2008
staged “harmonised” elections in which voters cast their votes at the same time for
Parliament, the President, the Senate, and their local municipal council.
March 2008 The voters' roll was supplied to political parties, though not in the
readable digital format specified. In addition, the roll for some constituencies was
delivered only after the election was over. The experience of the Zimbabwe
Electoral Support Network (ZESN) was typical, for instead of being supplied with
computer disks with the data in analysable form, the ZESN received – only well
after the elections had taken place – a set of 210 CDs of the roll in “tiff” (tagged
image file format). This meant that the CDs contained a photographic
reproduction of each page of the roll, a format not easily susceptible to analysis.
It must have been a large and deliberate exercise to photograph every page of the
roll in that way. It would certainly have been far easier for the Registrar-General
to supply the information in the digital form which his office already used. There
seems little doubt that the law was thus flouted, precisely with the objective of
preventing timeous analysis of the voters' roll.
2009 An MDC application to obtain a copy of the voters' roll as used in the
2008 harmonised elections was denied by the ZEC.
7
Zimbabwe Law Reports 2002, Morgan Tsvangirai v Registrar-General and Others, High Court,
Harare, HC 12092/01
8
The Hon Justice Mr. J Friedman, Report as Independent Observer, 15 January 2003
15