The Importance of the Voters’ Register in Zimbabwe

The quality of the voters' roll is crucial in maintaining public confidence in the integrity of elections. In the 2013 elections, the voters' roll contained thousands of names of dead people and double registrants, and was marred by under-registration of young voters. To address these issues, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) implemented biometric voter registration (BVR) technology to create a new voters' register ahead of the 2018 Harmonized Elections. The BVR method digitized voters' fingerprints, making it possible for the election authority to detect duplicate registrants and purge duplicates from the voters' register. The digitization of fingerprints and photographs resulted in a BVR amounting to over 8 terabytes. However, the size of the database made the speed of the central server a limiting factor, delaying the ZEC in making the version of the voters' roll available to the public in a searchable format. The ZEC was not able to make a machine analyzable version available until June 18, and the ZEC did not release a revised final roll until just days before the election. The new biometric voter registration drive began in September 2017 and ended in early February 2018. The ZEC registered 5,695,706 citizens representing 78.8% of the estimated voting age population, with a significant increase in young registrants compared to the 2013 voters' roll. According to an audit by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), the number of registrants 18 to 22 years of age increased by 372% while those 23 to 27 old increased by 83%. The ZEC utilized the new biometric technology reasonably well, with 92,745 names taken off the final voters' roll, of which almost 77% were duplicates. However, observers and political parties still expressed concerns regarding over-registration in rural areas benefiting the ruling party and lack of stakeholders' access to timely voter registration data. The ZEC's ability to conduct robust verification of the voters' roll was limited due to delays in making the version of the voters' roll available to the public. However, such delays will not be an issue in 2023, when the biometric voters' roll will merely require routine updating, not wholesale replacement. Continuous voter registration has been the practice in Zimbabwe going back to at least the 2002 general elections. Part IV 17A of the Electoral Act requires the registration of voters in Zimbabwe to be continuous. However, in actual fact, very few Zimbabweans avail themselves of this service. Partly this is due to disincentives, such as rural dwellers having to travel long distances and the mounting cost of public transportation being a deterrent for urban dwellers. Budgetary constraints have prevented the ZEC from overcoming the disincentives by mounting significant voter education campaigns to increase registration ahead of the nine by-elections conducted between July 2018 and July 2019, or voter education campaigns to promote continuous registration more broadly. There are four factors that affect the quality of Zimbabwe's voters' roll. The first is irregular reporting to the ZEC of deceased citizens by the Department of the Registrar General. The rate of reporting determines the number of deceased people's names on the voters' roll. The larger the number, the greater the vulnerability to charges of fraudulent voting in 2023 by persons using the names of deceased people. The second is ID cards, about which the EU Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) reported problems with a significant number of the IDs used to register. It is unclear if the source of this problem also rests with the Department of the Registrar General, which issues the national ID cards, or if it is due to a quality control issue within the ZEC. The third issue is that the software in the ZEC's BVR kits lacks a feature to prevent incorrect entry of ID numbers. Similarly, the data-entry fields for physical addresses permit the same address to be entered in different formats. The ZEC can rectify this issue by upgrading its BVR kits' software and improving the training of its voter registration personnel accordingly. The ZEC can ensure that more time is devoted to familiarizing BVR equipment operators with the proper set-up of BVR kits and with correct data capture. However, these steps can be undertaken only after the issue of incorrectly issued identity card numbers is addressed. The fourth issue impacting the quality of the voters' roll involves the ZEC's quality control regime in the field, where the bulk of the registration data is collected. More robust quality control by the ZEC could improve detection of errors and thereby permit corrective measures by the ZEC's provincial and district offices.