Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Report — Of Stuffed ballots and Empty Stomachs Voting Mechanics The list of polling stations was published 13 days before polling day, a day later than the 14 days required by the Electoral Act.43 The published details of the polling stations conflicted with the information announced by the chairman of ZEC. Chiweshe announced that there would be 8 235 polling stations. The list indicated that there were 8 137 stations.44 Either figure was more than double that for the previous election. This was appropriate as polling under the new procedure allowed for voting over one day only. This is a healthy change in that it allowed less time for the final figures to be massaged. The downside was that the opposition’s resources were severely stretched in trying to place election agents at all polling stations. More numerous polling stations also meant that less people would vote at each station and, particularly in rural areas, this laid the way open to easier identification of those voting and the possible application of intimidation to vote along certain lines. Other, in the main salutary, changes were made to the voting procedure which differed from previous elections. Translucent ballot boxes were used, transparent enough to see if any votes had been placed in the ballot box, but opaque enough to prevent the ballots themselves from being read. However, there were reports of people being intimidated by being told that their votes would not be secret as it would be possible to see how people were voting when they inserted their ballot papers into these new boxes. Two practices which may been seen as facilitating ballot box stuffing were abandoned, that is, mobile polling stations and centralised vote counting. Vote counting was done at individual polling stations. Counting at individual polling stations was supposed to prevent stuffing of boxes in transit to the central counting station. However, unless all the safeguards were in place, such as presence of observers and of election agents when counting took place, there was still a danger of manipulation of results at individual stations. This danger was particularly acute in remote rural areas. A new system of queuing according to surnames A-L, M and N-Z was used to speed up the process.45 A final change was the introduction of visible, ostensibly indelible, ink into which voters dipped their hands as an indication that they had voted. 46 Most Constituencies had between 30 and 80 polling stations. Generally, the rural areas had a greater number of polling stations than the urban. This was not unreasonable considering that the rural population is more widely dispersed and would need to travel greater distances, often by foot, to reach a polling station. 43 44 45 46 Section 51. This was announced at a briefing of local and international observers on 23 March 2005. A disproportionate number of names in Zimbabwe start with “M”. “Ostensibly” because it appear that the ink could in fact be removed with a modicum of effort. 16