HARARE – The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has said it needs at least a year to clean up the existing voters’ roll, adding to the intrigue surrounding the holding of the country’s next general elections.

In a development that effectively throws into disarray plans by President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF to call for elections in 2011, ZEC commissioner Bessie Nhandara said last week that the process of cleaning up the current discredited roll would involve voter registration and education exercises.

“At the moment dead people are still appearing on the voters roll. We will need about 12 months to clear out the old voters roll,” Nhandara said during a meeting between ZEC commissioners and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai last week.

Zanu (PF) said last week that there was "no reason" for Zimbabwe not to hold elections in 2011, citing sharp political differences the partners in the country’s coalition government.

Mugabe, 86, was forced into a power-sharing pact with his long-time rival Tsvangirai more than a year ago after a crisis over a 2008 national election that local and foreign observers say was marred by violence and vote-rigging.

In public, both ZANU PF and Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) have been telling their party structures to stay ready for elections, but privately their officials say the polls are at least two years away.

In a statement posted on its website last week, headlined "Elections inevitable”, ZANU PF said there are serious political differences in the fragile coalition and Zimbabwe should go for elections when the government's two-year mandate ends next year.

But Nhandara said ZEC was financially ill-equipped to deliver a new voters’ roll before the next polls.

"We are facing challenges because we don't have the tools for the job," she said.

Compounding ZEC’s challenges was the decision by Zimbabwe’s main political parties to replace the ward-based voters’ roll with one that lists prospective voters according to specific polling stations.

The proposed electoral reforms, agreed to by President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF and the rival MDC formations led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Premier Arthur Mutambara, seek to do away with the present ward-based voters’ roll and introduce polling station-specific voters’ rolls.

If effected into the Electoral Law, the reforms would mean voters would only be allowed to vote at the polling stations where their names appear on the roll. The current system allows registered voters to cast their ballot at any of several polling stations dotted around a constituency made up of a number of wards.

Observers say sufficient resources should be provided to ensure success of any re-registration and education exercise to be necessitated by the switch from ward-based to polling station-specific rolls.

The exercise must be carried out by ZEC with the support of an independent secretariat.

Sprucing up the voters roll is one of the contentious issues among the three parties involved in Zimbabwe’s fragile coalition government.

A local pressure group last year described the existing roll as being in shambles and called for its complete overhaul before the next general election to eliminate cases of multiple entries and weed out ghost voters.

An audit of the existing voters’ roll conducted by pressure group Sokwanele unearthed several anomalies in the current roll maintained by the Registrar General’s Office.

These included a surprisingly large number of people aged 100 and above. The audit identified names of 74 021 voters aged above 100 on the roll used in last year’s harmonised parliamentary and presidential elections.

There were also 82 456 people registered who are aged between 90 and 10 years old.

By Zimonline