ZESN Report on the 31 July 2013 Harmonised Elections of 9,73541 polling stations adding to its earlier number of 9,670. However, another list of an additional 65 polling stations was published on Election Day which also corrected wrong wards that resulted in many voters being turned away as they went to the wrong wards. Based on experience of managing elections regularly since 1980, ZEC was expected to release the list much earlier. In terms of the management process, there appeared to be more of a commitment to the letter of the law, at least superficially, rather than to ensuring the credibility of elections. For example, ZEC justified the ending of the voter registration exercise without including all prospective voters in order to abide by legal provisions. But the failure of so many citizens to register led to their disenfranchisement and a grave violation of their civil and political rights. Yet the same commission that applied to the Constitutional Court to be allowed to violate the law with regard to the special voting exercise, did not approach the court with a request to extend voter registration or to consider a supplementary voters’ roll, as has happened in the past. In June, a private website was launched that allowed voters to verify their registration status online. ZEC responded to this initiative to help Zimbabwe’s beleaguered electorate by saying that it needed to verify whether or not the website was legal. However, the Registrar-General of voters, issued a statement declaring the website illegal, thereby discouraging its use. Clearly, such a service must be ordinarily provided by the Registrar-General’s office, especially given the fact that the roll appearing on the website was an earlier version of the voters’ roll that emanated from that same office in the first place. There appeared to be no political will to provide such a service and it should have been up to ZEC, as the overall managers of all electoral preparations, to insist that the Registrar-General’s office provide such a service. In future ZEC, being the custodian of the voters’ roll, should take the lead and enable voters to check their registration status and their wards and polling stations online. The logistical problems during voter registration and the manner in which the special vote was conducted raised many questions about ZEC’s ability to conduct a successful election and created fears that the commission would be unable to manage the millions of voters on Election Day. In the run-up to the elections some organisations42 called on ZEC and the authorities to postpone the elections until all the conditions for a credible poll were met in order to avoid the challenges that characterised the special voting. 41 Insert in The Standard Newspaper - 28 July 2013,. Election Resource Centre - ‘Five reasons why ZEC should seek a poll postponement’, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. 42 41 | P a g e