deployed to the wards. Adequate signage would also help people to locate the registration
centers.
5. Pilot Voter Registration: The Commission needed to conduct a pilot registration process.
This was not done. So it appears that the voter registration happening at the different
district centers is, in more ways than one, the pilot that ZEC is conducting and therefore the
Commission must make use of the experience to prepare for the nationwide exercise. ZEC
needs to appraise stakeholders of all the lessons and challenges they will encounter in the
period between the Presidential proclamation of start dates and the day the ZEC deploys
the kits at the ward level. Further, ZEC also needs to rectify noted challenges when scaling
the process up to the nationwide registration.
6. Efficiency of the Registration Processes: During several stakeholder consultative meetings
ZEC indicated that it would need an average of 4 minutes to register a single voter.
Indications from ZESN observers on the ground show that the process is taking much longer.
On average, the process is taking about 10 minutes. In some cases it is taking more than 20
minutes. It also appears that there is need for ZEC to reconfigure the software on the kits as
the delays in processing time can be attributed to the considerable time it is taking to look
up the polling station where the registrant would like to cast their vote. In Bulawayo,
observers reported that there were some technical glitches that resulted in significant
delays to registering voters.
7. Proof of Residence: Some ZESN observers have indicated that some registrants have had to
look for a commissioner of oaths away from the registration centres. For instance, in Mutare
and Harare the centres did not have commissioner of oaths with registrants having to seek
for the services elsewhere for a fee. ZESN notes that ZEC needs to ensure that every
registration center has a commissioner of oaths as part of the registration team to ensure
that registrants without a proof of residents are not turned away. In addition, ZEC should
explicitly state the acceptable lifespan of proof of residence documents given that at some
centres people were being turned away after being informed that their proof of residence
documents were outdated and therefore invalid.
8. BVR Court Challenge: The MDC-T challenged the President’s proclamation of BVR dates
arguing that the President should not have proclaimed registration dates before ZEC
procured servers to store the data. The case is supposed to be heard on the 21st of
September, 2017. The basis of the court application is on concerns over absence of servers
to store the information, transmission of data from registration centre to district servers
and national servers, access of political parties to inspect the servers before information is
stored in the servers, and auditing of information stored in the servers. In addition, the
MDC-T argued that people are still acquiring Identity Documents in the nationwide exercise
by the Registrar General.
9. Amendment of Electoral Act: The President gazetted Statutory Instrument 117 of 2017 in
terms of Section 2 of the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act. There were
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