Appendix B 75 ZEC also successfully recruited approximately 130,000 polling officials to staff Zimbabwe’s 10,985 polling stations and smoothly conducted training for those officials. Opposition parties consistently accused the ZEC of being politically biased. Further fueling those concerns was a lack of consultation with the parties on the design of the presidential ballot, and there was not meaningful observation of the ballot production, storage and transportation processes. The presidential ballot is legally required to be arranged alphabetically, and regulations require that the candidates’ names appear in a single column. 4 However, the presidential ballot had 14 of the 23 candidates’ names in one column, and the second column of only nine candidates started with incumbent President Mnangagwa. The lopsided ballot layout provided a clear advantage to the incumbent, though the exact magnitude of the advantage is impossible to measure. The ZEC refused the opposition’s requests to test the quality of the indelible ink used on Election Day to mark voters’ fingers to prevent multiple voting and refused their request to randomly audit the security safeguards built into the ballot papers. The no-bid contracts awarded for procurement of such sensitive materials also did not build confidence in the ZEC’s impartiality. The ZEC fairly consistently took a “legalistic” approach, saying that since the law did not require a certain action it need not do it, and its public communications were weak. It did take some discretionary actions however, such as changing the positions of voting booths so that voters’ backs would face officials. After opposition parties and civil society organizations protested the change, the ZEC brought the issue to the MPLC and upon party agreement reversed that decision. Significantly, ZESN and others involved in Zimbabwe’s Election Situation Room (a platform of civil society groups) noted on July 28, that ZEC did not sufficiently present details on transparency and safeguards for its results tabulation and transmission process. For example, timely publication of polling station level results in addition to the aggregated presidential result would allow parties, citizens, and citizen groups to verify copies of official tally sheets given to party agents and posted publicly at polling stations. The ZEC should be commended for adopting the practice of providing such copies. Plus, it informed the ZIEOM and other international actors that it planned to publish on its website polling station results, though it committed late to that change and did not widely communicate the decision. New Voters Registry Another major effort of the ZEC was creating a new voters registry using biometric voter registration (BVR) that included photos and fingerprints of eligible voters. This was a result of moving production of the voters registry to the ZEC’s authority rather than the Registrar General’s office, which was widely perceived to be biased in past elections. The registration process went relatively well, creating a roll of 5,695,706 registered voters, 54 percent of whom are women. Unfortunately, the ZEC did not release publicly the preliminary voters registry for independent verification and confidence building. The ZEC explained that it was not legally 4 E.g., Open Parly Zimbabwe, ZEC wrong on ballot paper design: Veritas, article date, July 18, 2018; and Veritas, Election Watch 34-2018 - Presidential Ballot Paper, July 18, 2018. 5