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Today we vote and by now this should be a routine, albeit important event for most voters as they exercise their fundamental democratic right to choose their own leaders and representatives.
The seriousness means that it must be done peacefully and orderly. The process is relatively simply basic checks as you go in, the check to make sure you are on the roll, the voting and the final marking of a little finger to make sure you do not vote twice.
The rest of the public holiday is your own. You can go home, go to church, visit friends or if you work in some essential service, go to work.
The measures taken by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, starting with the assigning of every voter to a specific voting station and then making sure it is properly staffed, mean that while it is likely we have to queue, these lines are not intolerable and it will not take all that long to go through the process.
It should be fairly similar to the last election, but probably just that little bit faster as ZEC learn from experience.
So far as Zimbabweans we have done well. The run up to the elections has been largely peaceful. There have been a handful of incidents of intraparty and interparty violence, but none of those small outbursts bear any sign of organisation and they all seem to be spontaneous outbursts of exceptionally misplaced excitement.
A lot of groups have made a point of calling for a peaceful poll, starting with President Mnangagwa. Some other candidates and leaders of other political strands in the Zimbabwean landscape have not made these same pleas, which is regrettable, but we hope they will disabuse any of their supporters who may think this allows them to become violent later.
There are a few important rules about polling stations, but we all know them. Political activity is not allowed in their vicinity, people are not allowed to wear party regalia while waiting to vote, and no one is allowed to electioneer or to shout slogans near the polling station.
There has been some misplaced rumour mongering on social media platforms and people worried about the security of the vote, as if the staff at the polling stations, the collating centres where the results of each station go to be added to the rest in the ward or constituency, and the national command centres are people without integrity.
Our polling officers are not parachuted in from alien space ships. They are in general civil servants seconded from their normal duties, and as the schoolteachers are the largest group of civil servants they probably form the largest group of polling officers. So they are us, not some stranger. We have no idea how they vote, since they vote on the secret ballot.
The police, who will be present at each station to enforce the rules and protect the voters, are also not strangers. They live and work in communities, and are neighbours of other voters and friends of many.
When it comes to the transparency of the transparent, free and fair elections, election observers, some of whom apparently feel they should be allowed to run the elections, are just some icing on the cake. The main job belongs to the candidates and their election agents.
The Electoral Act gives every candidate the right to have their own agent in every polling station where they appear on the ballot.
Since this is a triple election, the main provision is that a political party that is contesting more than one of the polls run from a particular station can have three agents at the station, one inside and two outside with rotation allowed, and the inside person is present when the checks are made to ensure that all ballot papers are accounted for and that the number of folded ballot papers equals the number of people who voted.
They are there when the votes are counted and are invited to apply their own seals when the ballot boxes are sealed, check for lack of tampering when they are unsealed and sign off on the final result.
Independents and minor parties contesting just one of the polls run from a station are allowed two agents, one inside and one outside. While some independents might find it hard to raise a full team of agents, the major parties should be able to find the roughly 5 500 they need to have three at every station.
If they cannot find that number of responsible people they are not taking the poll seriously.
While these agents have to make promises of secrecy of results until these are formally announced, they are expected to question anything they think is untoward and obviously can make reports to their candidate and party after the poll.
They do not run the election, but they can watch throughout and make sure that every candidate has “their person” present throughout the process. This system, of ordinary civil servants of integrity running the polls and party or candidate agents watching the entire process from the start to the finish at every station means that voting must be done properly. The Zimbabwean and foreign observers are just icing on the cake. The integrity of the poll is maintained transparently through a number of provisions of the Electoral Act. These sometimes mean that actual counting does not start the second the poll closes.
There are those checks to account for every ballot paper assigned to the station, and to make sure that every folded ballot was on an official ballot paper assigned to that station, and that the number of people who voted and the number of ballots are equal.
Only then are ballots unfolded, sorted into piles for each candidate and counted. The results still have to be collated for each ward and constituency, that is all the votes in each station are added together.
Everyone needs to understand that in any election, there are winners and losers, and however hard it is for some people to understand why anybody would vote for anyone else, this is life. An election is decided on who wins the most votes, and those are cast by all the voters. There are so many checks made along the line, under so many pairs of eyes, that cheating is basically impossible. So we all need to accept the final results and accept the will of the majority of voters, however much, we dislike their choice. This is democracy.
leeroy
Online Reporter