The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) says it registered 110 000 new voters during the just-ended 20-day second phase of the voter registration blitz.
ZEC spokesperson Jasper Mangwana on Tuesday 3 May, told The Herald that only 49 000 people registered during the first phase conducted for 28 days.
Mangwana commended the Registrar General’s office which also launched a mobile registration blitz which runs from 1 April to 30 September this year. He said:
The huge numbers we have received during this phase can be attributed to the confidence and credibility that Zimbabweans are showing in the Commission.
In this second voter registration phase that was conducted in just 20 days, we received about 110 000 new voter registrants.
During the first phase conducted for 28 days, we only had about 49 000 applications and this time the numbers have doubled.
We give credit to the office of the Registrar General for handling the issue of national identity documents with professionalism to enable people to register to vote.
Mangwana said ZEC will embark on a data cleaning exercise to deal with the issue of double registration. He said:
We are going to embark on a data cleaning exercise in which we will remove all duplicated applications. This de-duplication exercise will provide final data to the people.
Remember we had CSOs that were involved in this drive but in some cases ended up having double voter registrants. We need to clean that.