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The process of drafting possible changes to the Constitution to move the voters’ roll from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission back to the Registrar General and to set up a separate Delimitation Commission to sit when needed has started.
The trigger for looking at these issues arose in the last Parliament when there was unanimity among Zanu PF and opposition legislators of what sort of improvements were desirable during debate on necessary amendments to the Electoral Act for the August harmonised elections.
Now Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Ziyambi Ziyambi has started the process that will eventually lead to the Constitutional changes, and these will then have to be followed by changes to Electoral Act, which turns the bare bones of the law in the Constitution into the detailed nitty-gritty required to make it work.
During the debate and public discussion that led to the present Constitution and its approval by a vast majority in Parliament and then the entire nation in a referendum, there was full agreement to upgrade the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and its independence and make it responsible for running elections, taking over that function entirely from the Registrar General.
The consensus is still for the ZEC to remain and for it to have 100 percent authority to run elections and no one wants to see any change there.
However, at the urging of then opposition legislators, the Constitution also gave the ZEC the sole authority to register citizens as voters and to maintain the national voters’ roll. Under subsidiary legislation that voters’ roll saw every voter not just being listed by name and address and national ID but also by their ward, constituency and province and the polling station they were assigned to.
Debating in Parliament last year on the Electoral Act, there was a general feeling, led by two opposition MPs, that citizens should be registered as voters automatically when they registered for their national ID. As one of the proposers eloquently put it, there had been a commendable and major national effort by the Registrar General to sort out the missing documentation of all Zimbabweans, including registering for their national ID those who had not registered, or had been unable in the past to register.
One reason for the major effort was to ensure that everyone who wanted to register for the vote had a national ID so they could line up for a second time with the ZEC and do so. But it still meant they had to line up twice.
Minister Ziyambi explained that the problem arose because the then opposition did not trust the then Registrar General, the exceptionally long-serving Tobaiwa Mudede, to maintain the voters’ roll and so wanted that function moved across to the ZEC to be added to the electoral functions. That is why it needs a Constitutional amendment to move it back.
The major and successful effort to improve efficiency and accountability to very high levels means that this is now trusted by just about everyone.
We still see some bits that will need to be added at either the Constitutional amendment stage or the Electoral Act amendment stage, or perhaps both. Most Zimbabweans register for their national ID before they are 18, but after the minimum age of 16, because they need the ID card for O-Level exams.
Legally they cannot simultaneously register for the vote as they are not 18. But it should be possible to insert a clause that they can still be automatically registered as a voter, unless they expressly refuse, but are put in a “waiting room” on the database and only move onto the voters roll, automatically, on their 18th birthday. This is just software.
As the Registrar General issues death certificates the procedure for removing dead voters remains the same except done by the certificate issuer, rather than having lists of certificates sent across to the ZEC. But it is not yet compulsory to register a death, although as more and more people acquire property it is compulsory once inheritance comes into play and the Master of the High Court wants to see a death certificate before approving an executor and transfers of property or even money in bank accounts.
But there are still people who die without anything to inherit and the authorities are simply told of the death in the application for a burial order. There needs to be an extra procedure whereby someone checks burial orders and sees which ones are not backed by the death certificate. It might even be an idea to make registering deaths with the civil registry compulsory in this modern age. This would sort out some later problems and in the meantime it would make it easy to make sure all dead voters were removed from the roll.
Delimitation was done by separate independent and temporary commissions from 1985, all chaired by Justice Wilson Sandura as he rose from a newly appointed High Court Judge to the Supreme Court. They were appointed at the prescribed regular intervals and generally managed to do their job without anyone objecting and were able to take on expert seconded staff.
The last delimitation was the first done by ZEC, using its own commissioners and staff. As in all delimitations there were a lot of people who did not like it, such as when they saw their constituency or were concerned over actual later voting figures rather than registration figures in each constituency. Some of the objections, none substantiated, were even used to try and mould the final report of the SADC Observer Mission.
It appears that there might well be good grounds for restoring an independent delimitation commission, but one only appointed every decade as laid down in the Constitution. There would need to be the usual mechanism for selecting the chairperson and commissioners, and it worked when the chairperson was a judge, and there would need to be a way of making sure very high-calibre staff could be seconded for the necessary period.
All Constitutional Bills have to be debated in public and in committee before going to the vote in Parliament, so there is ample opportunity for everyone to make sure that the final result is a significant improvement, since we generally want Constitutional changes to come through by consensus, as our Constitution did. It is also a good idea that the Electoral Act and other voting legislation and procedures have general agreement, so solid debate and discussion is needed. Minister Ziyambi is moving early, so there is plenty of time and we can get it right.
Online Reporter