ZIMBABWE: PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS - 2005 9 compared to the rest of the country are inaccurate and that the reduction of seats from these two MDC strongholds is incorrect. Another important issue is whether the delimitation within the provinces is correct, and to what extent political considerations have been unduly influential in the re-drawing of constituencies. The constituencies should ideally be the same size, but they should also follow administrative and natural boundaries whenever possible. The maximum deviation from the average size is set at +/- 20%. The average size of constituencies was 47,155, which meant that each constituency needed to be larger than 37,724 and smaller than 56,586. All constituencies fulfilled this criterion. When redrawing the constituencies quite a few had to be adjusted to fall between the boundaries or to simply become more equal in size. Comments to some specific constituencies are given in Section 10.2. Election Violence There can be no doubt that there were far fewer reports of state controlled, systematic violence in 2000 and 2002. The violence continued from 2002 till late 2004, but has after the President’s Address to the Nation in December 2004 been significantly reduced. MDC agrees that actual, state co-ordinated violence has been reduced or is eliminated. However, local incidents of actual violence are still reported. In addition there are continued reports of subtle threats of violence, intimidation, links of voting to food distribution, etc. There were areas where local supporters of MDC could not act openly, but where MDC had to campaign using non-resident supporters. Media The most important media is radio, whereas TV plays a role mainly in the cities. Electronic media are all state owned and controlled. Candidates are given access to programmes where they are questioned on their political platforms and issues. In addition, there are provisions for paid advertisements. This positive development came as a direct result of the SADC Standards, which lists the principle of ‘2.2.5 Equal opportunity for all political parties to access the state media’, which is regulated through a directive issued by the Minister of Information and Publicity. The programmes that were not directly related to the elections, such as the news and other current affairs programs, were still overly biased in favour of the incumbents. The