26 IRI/NDI Zimbabwe International Election Observation Mission Final Report supporters. Other violations included threats of withdrawal of food aid and agricultural inputs. These violations were allegedly committed by war veterans, traditional leaders, and ZANU-PF members including its local leadership, ward chairpersons, councilors, and youth officers.24 With the aim of increasing the accuracy of the voters roll, the ZEC used the data obtained from the BVR for both alphanumeric and biometric deduplication exercises. The deduplication process sought to remove duplicate names from the voters roll. The data was compiled centrally and processed using Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) software. The software provides automated fingerprint search capabilities, electronic image storage, and electronic exchange of fingerprints. An alphanumeric deduplication exercise was carried out prior to the biometric deduplication because the equipment for the latter arrived late. The ZEC stated that examples of the errors found in the data cleaning exercise included voters assigned to the wrong polling stations, duplicate IDs, and typographical errors. As a result of the exercise, some 11,000 voters were excluded from the voters roll, hence the discrepancy between the number of voters registered during the BVR process and those on the official voters roll. Between May 19 and 29, the ZEC implemented a voters roll inspection exercise, which allowed voters to confirm their registration status and the accuracy of the information in the provisional voters roll. In addition, for the first time, the ZEC established a mechanism by which citizens could verify their registration information via mobile phones and a website, in addition to in-person visits to inspection centers. When political parties and CSOs sought access to the provisional voters roll, the ZEC declined to distribute the provisional version in an electronic format, claiming that distributing the provisional roll, which included many mistakes, would undermine confidence in the process. This decision was broadly criticized and subject to a court challenge, which succeeded in the High Court but was reversed by the Supreme Court. While the ZEC refused to provide copies of any of the preliminary voters roll, on June 18, the ZEC made available what was described as the “final” voters roll in electronic and analyzable format. This version contained the name, age, ID number, and place of registration for each voter who registered prior to June 1 and who was therefore eligible to vote in the July 30 elections (though the voters roll did not include information on the date of registration). The ZEC provided copies of the voters roll in a non-modifiable PDF format, which then had to be downloaded on to a personal flash drive. A revised final voters roll was only released days before Election Day, which limited the ability of parties and civil society to conduct robust verifications. Two voter roll audit reports were released. One by ZESN and another by Team Pachedu, which described itself as an ad hoc group with various areas of expertise. The ZESN report headline was “2018 Voters Roll an Improvement Over 2013 Preliminary Voters Roll.”25 By contrast, Team Pachedu’s report was more critical, concluding that “the voters roll ZEC has released to the public contains anomalies that make it unfit for use in the upcoming 2018 Harmonized Election” and recommended “the election to be held on 30th July 2018 be postponed pending resolution of the 24 “Biometric Voter Registration Update.” ZESN, Zimbabwe Election Support Network, Feb. 8, 2018, www.zesn.org. zw/. 25 Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) Human Rights Violations Report. Heal Zimbabwe Trust, www. healzimbabwetrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/BVR-Human-Rights-Violations-Report.pdf.