Perhaps the most notable instance of “over-registration” is Mbare in Harare Metropolitan Province. With an adult population of only 19 351, according to the census, some 43 169 voters are registered in this politically sensitive constituency. The registration rate is thus 223%. 10 906 voters have been added to the roll since 2008, a number which will increase when the final roll for 2013 has been complied. The voter population in this constituency is already well over the 20% variation allowed for each constituency from the mean of 27 972 (see below). In Epworth, however, where many of the socio-economic conditions are similar to those in Mbare, there are only16 35 703 voters in a constituency of 84 157 adults, yielding a registration rate of 42%. Bearing in mind that there is no reason to exclude the factors which cause overregistration from Epworth, the actual registration rate in Epworth is extremely low as even the 42% must be considered to include entries which should not be part of the roll. No pattern of political bias is discernible from the analysis of the constituencies. For example, while the three Matabeleland provinces, which are generally strongholds of the MDC formations, may be said to show a rough leaning towards over-registration, Harare Province which is also an MDC stronghold, has a significantly lower registration than other provinces at 72% - compared with Bulawayo (88%), Manicaland (83%), Mashonaland Central (91%), Mashonaland East (96%), Mashonaland West (81%), Masvingo (94%), Matabeleland North (94%), Matabeleland South (99%) and Midlands (92%). The lower registration for Harare may be explained partly by the higher presence of persons in the province still unable to register as deemed to be aliens by the Registrar-General, particularly in the case of Epworth with a singularly low registration rate, and partly by the possibility that death notices are more regularly and efficiently sent to the Registrar-General in Harare than in more remote districts. This latter explanation would assume that the RegistrarGeneral of Births and Deaths (who is also the Registrar-General of voters and Registrar-General of citizenship) acts upon such death notices to remove the erstwhile voters from the roll. Registration in Urban and Rural Areas. The registration rate differs considerably between rural and urban areas. Some constituencies comprise both urban and rural wards and are categorized in Table 3 below as “mixed” constituencies. Comparing the number of registered voters in rural, urban and mixed constituencies yields the following table. Table 3: Registration by Rural and Urban Areas TYPE MIXED RURAL URBAN Totals: ADULT POPULATION VOTERS 692,322 4,234,606 1,819,458 6,746,386 558,507 3,891,425 1,345,223 5,874,114 % OF POPULATION REGISTERED 80.7% 93.8% 73.9% 87.1% The registration rate in purely rural constituencies, from which ZANU PF is regarded as drawing the bulk of its support, is thus considerably higher (94%) than that in purely urban constituencies (74%) from which the MDC formations as regarded as drawing most of their support, that is, about 20% more. This is particularly so in the over 65+ age bands, as Figure 1 indicates, with the more detailed description given in Appendix 3. 16 Despite the low registration rate the number of voters in this constituency still exceeds 20% above the mean. 7