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Hundreds attempt to cheat ZEC: Commission raises alarm over CSO voter fraud

ZEC raises alarm over CSO voter fraud

HUNDREDS of Zimbabweans fraudulently registered to vote more than once in the just ended year, with some registering six times, in a desperate bid to collect incentives from civic society organisations, Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has said.

However, their attempt to cheat voter registration process was exposed by ZEC’s finger-print verification process which weeded out hundreds of individuals who had registered multiple times in the just ended year.

This comes after several civic society organisations and the opposition claimed to have assisted thousands of people to register to vote after the commission announced it had managed to register slightly over 3,000 people in the 12 months to December 2021.

ZEC chairman Priscilla Chigumba said the commission’s verification process found various anomalies and rightfully pushed out multiple registrants.

A new voter registrant will require their finger print to be verified before they can be entered into the voters roll even after they have received a voter registration slip, ZEC said.

“I will say this without fear. There were a lot of people that were given incentives to register to vote and those people did not disclose to the CSO’s that they were already registered to vote, in order to access the incentives. Those people were then flagged by our system to say there is a person with one set of finger print that registered six times but there were already on the voter’s roll,” Chigumba told ZTN.

“You come to me and say ‘we registered 260 people to vote.’ ‘Were you aware that they were already registered did you know that their IDs were authentic, you cannot cheat the ZEC system?”

However, Chigumba said she had no evidence of civic society organisations’ involvement in the fraudulent activities but said “it had been reported to us that” individuals would “deliberately go to different registration centres and to civic organisations giving incentives but the verification system redflagged them to be already be registered to vote.”