Beverly Bizeki
Former Masvingo Central MP Jeffreyson Chitando and one of the provincial Citizens Coalition for Change leaders has said being assisted to vote must be a criminal offence in Zimbabwe unless in extreme cases where aid is genuinely needed as way of curbing voter intimidation.
Chitando was speaking during the presentation of a report on Voting Trends from the 2023 Harmonized Elections by the Election Resource Centre (ERC) at Flamboyant Hotel recently where different election stakeholders including ZEC, political parties and Civic Society Organizations participated.
Commenting on the report which showed that the rural population counted for more than normal number of assisted voters, Chitando said the majority of Zimbabweans were literate and the number of people who should be assisted to vote should be very small.
“Zimbabwe has literate people, I worked as a teacher in rural areas some time ago and we never witnessed such a number of illiterate people as we are seeing now. Legislators should push for an amendment to the constitution where being assisted to vote is criminalized unless there is a genuine reason.
“I was the provincial chief election agent for my party and I witnessed a number of cases where able people were assisted to vote and they were assisted in most cases by people who are less well up than them and that showed they were being forced to be assisted,” said Chitando
He also went on to recommend the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to increase voter education and involve all political parties during blitz to avoid misinformation by other political parties who lie to supporters that they can see who they voted for.
”ZEC should increase its voter education and tell people that their vote is their secret. To do that effectively, they should involve all political parties and they should all be present during the processes so that no political party will tell its supporters that they will be seen when voting,” said Chitando
He said voters were not supposed to carry phones to the booth as some were forced to take pictures of the ballot paper before casting to show their authority.
Zanu PF representative and the Party’s deputy provincial youth chair Charles Munganasa said there was need to have an in-depth analysis of the voting patterns so as to understand the reasons why people were assisted.
He also said the variance between urban and rural number of assisted voters could be attributed to age since a number of old people retreat to rural homes and also that’s where the number of illiterate people is bigger compared to urban areas.
“For this to be comprehensive enough, we should have reasons for why these people were assisted. We should also take note of the fact that the number of old people is higher in rural areas. Also, the number of illiterate old women is high because some of them are the ones who were disadvantaged by patriarchy where boys were given preference when it comes to going to school,” said Munganasa
The report showed that 2 348 people were assisted to vote out of the 188 sampled polling stations targeting constituencies with a rural-urban voting demographic sampled for the study and the rural population accounted for 60.9 percent while the urban population accounted for the remaining 39.1 percent.
According to the report, the polling station with the highest percentage of assisted votes was Chalala Primary School in ward 1, Kariba Constituency which had 149 assisted votes out of the 349 who voted making up 46.3 percent assisted votes at the station.
On second position was Ndiyadzo Primary School in ward 9 Chipinge Central Constituency where 591 votes were cast with 131 voters assisted to make 22.2 percent assisted votes.
ERC noted that on some observed polling stations, 25 percent of the ballots cast in the first two hours of the morning were assisted votes.
“ERC notes that on average 5.4 percent of votes cast between 0700 hours and 0900hours were assisted votes. Alarmingly at 8.6 percent of observed polling stations, statistics show that over 25 percent of the ballots cast during this period were cast by assisted voters,” reads part of the report.
It was also noted that the number of assisted votes reduced by 1.6 percent between 0900hours and 1200hours.
