Prior to and on the Election Day, a group of CSOs operated an Election Situation Room (ESR) in Harare, where citizens could call in to report election-related concerns, which the ESR would then channel to the appropriate authorities. CSOs offered other forms of assistance on Election Day, including ferrying some voters to the polling stations. CSOs were also actively involved in the electoral dispute process. CSOs expressed a lack of confidence in some areas of oversight by the ZEC. One such area was the voters roll. During the Group’s briefings, the National Association of NGOs (NANGO), the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), highlighted scepticism regarding the existence and release of several ‘final’ versions of the voters roll, the deployment of the postal vote prior to BVR finalisation, and the failure to demonstrate or detail the results management system. Issues raised were those that had the potential of undermining voters’ free political will and the overall credibility of the elections. Citizen observers In terms of citizen observers, one of the most systematic, effective and robust civic engagements came from the interventions of the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN), a network of 36 organisations formed to co-ordinate activities pertaining to elections in Zimbabwe. The Group confirmed the presence of ZESN officials in almost all the estimated 360 polling stations visited. ZESN deployed more than 2,000 observers for the BVR process and covered all the four phases of the registration exercise. Critical activities included auditing the voters roll, deployment of 210 long-term observers and 6,000 short-term observers, and deploying 420 official mobile supervisors and 25 eminent persons to lead the observer mission: 15 were drawn from the regions and 10 from the local level. Another local citizen observer group, the Election Resource Centre (ERC), a non-partisan think-tank and advocacy institution on elections and democracy, also observed the elections, as did the World Council of Churches and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches. On Election Day, civic command centres were set up across the provinces to monitor the electoral process, including the setting-up of polling stations, the vote, and the results and tally process. A number of Election Situation Rooms (ESRs) monitoring incidents of violence and election-related issues were established, as indicated above. Commonwealth observers visited a number of the ESRs at both the national and the local levels, to get a sense of the nature and types of incidents being reported in the communities where they were deployed. 35