Police have arrested members of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) and the Electoral Resource Centre (ERC) allegedly for running parallel voter tabulation.
Police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi on Thursday said the arrests were made at Holiday Inn, Belgravia, Milton Park and Grange in Harare.
Police seized laptops and cellphones.
The arrests were made despite Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairperson, Priscilla Chigumba, encouraging civil society organisations (CSOs) to conduct parallel voter tabulation to help counter claims of vote rigging ahead of by-elections in 2022.
newZWire on Thursday, 24 August, reported that Chigumba urged ZESN to lead a parallel voter tabulation system, which would collate official results in the form of V11s forms.
Addressing a meeting of political parties and observer groups last year, Chigumba said:
Could CSOs unite and set up a parallel voter tabulation, not only for the by-elections but for 2023? Do you know how that enhances the ZEC process?
Because if all of you have V11s, the certificate of primary evidence, it’s very easy for you to tell whether ZEC has stolen something or it hasn’t.
Listen ZESN, because you did that in 2018, can we ask you to set up a panel of ten CSOs and come up with your own parallel voter tabulation so that in 2023 you can tell us “ZEC, we have all the V11s, the figures are mathematically correct, or mathematically incorrect”.
The Electoral Law bars anyone from declaring a candidate the winner before ZEC has done so but it is not illegal to collate results from V11s.
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