(5) Fees prescribed for the purposes of subsection (3) or (4) shall not exceed the reasonable cost of providing the voters roll concerned. (6) Within a reasonable period of the time after nomination day in an election, the Commission shall provide (a) free of charge, to every nominated candidate, one copy in electronic form of the constituency voters roll to be used in the election for which the candidate has been nominated; and (b) at the request of any nominated candidate, and on payment of the prescribed fee, one copy in printed form of the constituency voters roll to be used in the election for which the candidate has been nominated. (7)  here a voters roll is provided in electronic form in terms of subsection (3), (4) W or (6), its format shall be such as allows its contents to be searched and analysed: Provided that— (i) the roll may be formatted so as to prevent its being altered or otherwise tampered with; (ii) the Commission may impose reasonable conditions on the provision of the roll to prevent it from being used for commercial or other purposes unconnected with an election.” The provision was detailed by even stating that electronic copies had to be provided in formats which made it possible to analyse it. On the final register this never happened. The voter register as per June 2013, before the registration drive started, was made available for review. It contained 5,874,115 voters. The Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) published their review of the register in July.12 It concluded that the register had a number of duplicates and dead people on the lists and that a large portion of the young people had not been registered. It also stated that 63 constituencies had more registered voters than citizens according to the census 2012, and that 41 constituencies deviated with more than the permitted 20 % from the average number of voters. After this report came out, similar reviews were impossible since the register was not made available to stakeholders. Only statistics from the later registration effort were published. On 9 July the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) presented new figures broken down by province. The total was reported to have reached 6,187,003. Then finally, on 22 July the Registrar General announced in The Herald that the total had come to 6.4 Million, without providing a breakdown. He did, however, mention that 748,000 new voters were registered in the last registration drive. The ZEC was responsible for giving the voters register to the parties but they pointed at the Registrar General when asked why they had not provided such copies. On election day MDC-T received a printed copy but that was too late for a review and the format made 12 Research & Advocacy Unit (2013), An Audit of Zimbabwe’s 2013 Voters’ Roll,1July 2013, Harare: Research & Advocacy Unit. . 24 a proper analysis very difficult. The accreditation of observers was not in place in time to observe the start of the last voter registration drive, but when it had been finalised ZESN could on 10 July report: “Of major concern was the slow processing of people at the registration centres. ZESN has observed that people had to stand in long queues, sometimes up to eight hours before being attended and this was mostly observed in urban areas. ZESN observers in Bulawayo noted how some officials from the Registrar General’s office seemed to be inadequately trained. This resulted in some people being turned away at the close of the process despite having been in queues for the whole day.” This is consistent with a number of other reports stating that in Harare and Bulawayo where the MDC formations have their main supporter base, the process of registration was extremely slow and many people gave up registering. The development of the voter registration since 2000 is shown in Table 1 below. 2000 2002 Registered voters 200513 2008 201314 Bulawayo 357,281 363,028 339,990 320,772 310,390 Harare 799,452 882,176 832,571 784,598 798,264 Manicaland 575,404 658,694 686,767 774,482 798,677 Mashonaland Central 418,277 480,092 490,181 522,107 568,600 Mashonaland East 506,817 589,185 610,715 658,123 710,323 Mashonaland West 502,964 572,677 593,354 625,729 656,036 Masvingo 593,778 655,122 675,234 740,969 769,263 Matabeleland North 317,405 338,186 342,745 366,271 383,267 Matabeleland South 319,015 343,993 341,258 355,480 371,143 Province Midlands Total 658,422 724,659 745,822 786,237 821,040 5,048,815 5,607,812 5,658,637 5,934,768 6,187,003 Table 1: The voter registers by province from 2000 to 2013 13 sett inn fotnote14 13 During the delimitation of constituencies for the 2005 election the total number of registered voters was 5,658,637 as shown above. However, immediately prior to the elections the ZEC published the new figure of 5,789,912 (23 March 2005). 14 The last breakdown published on 9 July 2013, but not the one used during the elections. 25