ON ELECTION DAY – BREACHES AND ANOMALIES 10. Presence of Police inside polling stations all day including during the vote count. This violates Sections 55(6) and 62 of the Electoral Act. Police were noted countrywide as being present inside polling stations, and of regularly getting information about votes cast, assisted votes and people turned away from the Presiding Officer and relaying this on via cell phone, phone and radio. This is entirely illegal, as police are specifically precluded from any voting activities in a polling station. Police also noted names and details of visitors to stations, and most problematically, were present inside polling stations during the count. Section 62 is very specific as to who may be present during a count, and it excludes police. As Coltart comments: “This is no mere technical breach of the Electoral Act – it goes to the very heart of a free and fair election. As stated above…. the ZRP generally acts in a partisan manner. Law in Zimbabwe is often used selectively as a weapon, not as a fine instrument of justice. Accordingly the presence of police officers in polling stations during the vote and their actions in recording votes cast would in itself have been highly intimidatory, especially to many rural voters. Their presence and the recording of votes cast by police officers in both the voting process and the count may well have facilitated a much wider fraud.” 11. Busing of voters not resident in area, and turning away of residents In several urban and rural constituencies, it was observed that busloads of people not usually resident in that area were voting en masse, while at the same time, hundreds of voters who did reside in the area and had registered there, were turned away. Bulawayo East candidate David Coltart made this observation: I saw hoards of shaven‐headed young men in my constituency, and we did not understand the full impact of what they were doing until the evening. There were seven polling stations that were located within a 2 kilometer radius of Brady [army] Barracks, and when the results came out, they bore no relation to historical trends in that area. ZANU PF in those particular polling stations got ten times more votes than I did, which was completely disproportionate to what happened in other areas. The next thing is that hundreds of people were turned away in my constituency for allegedly not being on the voters’ roll. These were people that have voted before.116 Tendai Biti made a similar observation in Mount Pleasant, where hundreds of youths who appeared unable to speak English (unusual in an urban constituency) were voting under close supervision, after being bussed apparently from a distant rural area. These voters were all carrying registration slips, indicating that they were newly registered voters. There have been allegations that cannot be independently verified, that in some instances the registration slips were fake.117                                                                                                                                                                                                  116 Interview with SWRadioAfrica, 23 August 2013. 117 See SPT video of Biti confronting these youth in Mount Pleasant. Similar busing of voters was reported by individuals to Sokwanele. This included the alleged busing of voters from Mozambique to vote in Zimbabwean constituencies bordering this country.   54