Polling stations were provided with special voting booths to cater for PWDs whose height is less than of those used by the rest of the voters ZESN however continues to call upon ZEC to avail voting statistics disaggregated by gender amongst other categories to enable an informed analysis of the women and men’s participation in electoral processes. 8.7. Political Party Agents and other Observer Groups It is critical for political parties, being the primary stakeholders in an election, to invest in deploying party agents who will observe electoral processes on behalf of their parties, candidates, and supporters. Party agents have to satisfy themselves that electoral processes would have been done well at their stations of deployment. Section 95 (1a and b) of the Electoral Act provides for one party agent to be placed inside the polling station and an additional two agents within the vicinity of the same polling station. Thus a political party can have up to three agents per polling station. For the Mutoko North by-election, ZANU-PF deployed party agents comprehensively; every polling station and collation centre was manned by one or more ZANU-PF agents. MDC Alliance was not represented by agents in only very few of the polling stations while the NCA did not have even a single agent at any of the centres. The failure to deploy agents at polling stations denies a party an opportunity to make informed assessment of the electoral processes. Besides political party agents, the observation of electoral processes by independent or neutral observers further increases confidence in stakeholders. Other election observers 20