ZESN - Promoting Democratic Elections in Zimbabwe 9. Political Parties Zimbabwe's legal framework does not require political parties to register. Hence towards every general election there is a sudden surge in the number of political parties that emerge with the intention of contesting the elections. Before the Nomination Courts on 14 June 2018, there were reports of the existence of as many as 133 political parties that wanted to contest the 2018 harmonised election. The number however dropped to 55 after the sitting of the Nomination Courts as some parties did not submit candidates for consideration by the Nomination Court. However, voting started late in some constituencies such as Norton where voting had not commenced by noon owing to absence of ballot papers. In other instances, the publicized venues were not used, leading to some confusion as to the location of the polling stations. Initially, the party notified their members that public venues would be used. However, on the actual polling day, most of the venues were located in private places such as homes of party members and district offices of the party, making it difficult for observers to access them.35 9.1 Political Parties Primary Elections Of the 55 political parties that participated in the elections, only ZANU-PF held primary elections throughout the country. The MDC Alliance, on the other hand, relied on a hybrid process where meetings were convened for the alliance's members to reach consensus on who would represent the alliance in the various parliamentary constituencies and local council wards. For the most part, primary elections were held whenever interested candidates failed to reach consensus. In other instances, aggrieved party members chose to stand as independent candidates. As for the less dominant political parties, the candidate selection processes were unclear, with reports that the leadership of those parties made arbitrary decisions on who would represent their respective parties. 9.2 Nomination Court Proceedings The Nomination Courts sat on 14 June 2018 to receive papers from nominees for the 2018 local authority, National Assembly, and presidential elections. ZESN deployed Long Term Observers (LTOs) to observe the Nomination Court proceedings in a total of 116 Nomination Courts including ward level, National Assembly and the presidential Nomination Courts across all 10 provinces. Of the nomination centres where ZESN observed, 82% opened on time and had started receiving nomination papers by 1030 hours. On average, the courts handled between 20 and 140 applications. Only 33% of the courts completed verification of nomination papers by 1700 hours while the majority were still checking nomination documents until very late in the evening. For instance, in Mutare nominees were able to submit their papers after 1900 hours while the Nomination Courts for Matabeleland South (Magistrates Court in Gwanda), Mashonaland West (Chinhoyi Civil Court), completed the process the following day at 0200 hours . Generally, observation of candidate selection processes and primary elections for political parties remains a challenge for observers as parties view this process as an internal process which is closed to outsiders. The situation is compounded by the fact that ZEC is not involved in any way in the primary elections for political parties. The ZESN mobile teams therefore observed ZANU-PF primaries from a distance. Unsuccessful Nomination Applications ZESN observers reported instances where some nominees could not successfully submit their The general political environment during the ZANU-PF primary elections was generally calm. 35 ZESN’s Report on the Nomination Court can be accessed on <http://www.zesn.org.zw/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ZESN-Report-on-the-Nomination-Court-Observations.pdf> 37 REPORT ON THE 30 JULY 2018 HARMONISED ELECTIONS ZESN