10. CIVIC AND VOTER EDUCATION
Civic and Voter Education on the BVR process was the jurisdiction of ZEC, which elected to partner and
or allow at least 40 Civil Society Organisations to participate in the process. However, during its
December 2017 briefing to CSOs and FBO, ZEC reported that only half of the organisations it had
selected hand been visible on the ground providing civic education
.
ZEC and civil society made use of various forms of civic education, including through:
Door to door engagements with prospective voters, where ZEC and CSOs provided
information on the BVR process,
Radio and television adverts, including influencer marketing where famous personalities were
used to spread information on the BVR process.
Radio, television, and Talk shows and town hall meetings.
Fliers and poster distributions,
Billboards
Social media – twitter and Facebook,
Roadshows
The materials used for civic education were of a high standard and had been vetted and approved by
ZEC for participating CSOs. While ZEC provided a lot of civic and voter education, there were challenges
with timeliness and adequacy of the voter education.
10.1
Timeliness
From the onset, the BVR process Voter and Civic education process suffered from a sequencing problem.
In part, as already highlighted the BVR process was a rush job, which ZEC executed well under the
circumstances. However, standard practice is that voter education should be conducted before the
registration process, to allow prospective voters to know about the process, its prerequisites, and how
to optimise opportunities presented through the process.
There was a tiny window in between critical BVR decisions on Kits, process and legislative regularization
and the onset of the exercise. In the main, ZEC and its partners were not able to provide BVR Voter and
civic education well ahead of the process. The observable implications of this were that voter and civic
education were mainly conducted concurrently with the BVR process instead of before it, resulting in
challenges associated with the second key challenge of adequacy.
10.2
Adequacy
Also due to the late onset of civic and voter education, the process also became inadequate. Multitudes
of prospective registrants went to register with limited knowledge of what the process entailed, what
was required of them and what the BVR process involved.
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