By Terrence Mawawa| The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has blocked MDC leader Nelson Chamisa’s party’s demands for a structured inspection of the voters roll.

Two months ago, Chamisa’s aide and Secretary General Douglas Mwonzora made a loud call for an audit of the voters roll. This came amid fears of alleged tampering by the ZEC whose part composition as Mwonzora protested, is 45 staffers who are all ex soldiers. Other warnings were issued by the US Harvard University which conducted an acclaimed broad research exposing how the BVR system is prone to a tonne of criminal-level vulnerabilities.

“We want to have an audit of the voters roll. People should also know that it is illegal for people to collect serial numbers from people who registered to vote,” said Mwonzora.

But yesterday it was revealed the ZEC “will not allow any voters roll” database audit, as a source inside the body told ZimEye.

The refusals come at a time when the ZEC is saddled with allegations of secretly incorporating alleged Russian methods of vote rigging.

Without audit level access to the database, experts say anything is possible and the Havard research paper says, one tactic, would be to simply change voters’ addresses, making it appear — to poll workers at least — as though they were voting at the wrong locations. Those voters might be forced to cast provisional ballots, which in many circumstances are not counted.

The study is described in a Sept. 6 paper published in the Journal of Technology Science.

Though the researchers don’t report evidence of attackers already exploiting the vulnerability, Sweeney, Yoo, and Zang said the fear is that it might be used to undermine confidence in elections or even to swing the result in favor of a particular candidate.

“If the goal is to undermine any belief in the electoral system, then they might very well want to target a particular community at large … [because] that could cause a kind of hysteria,” Sweeney said. “People will say: ‘What kind of system is this? We didn’t get a chance to vote. Our whole community didn’t get a chance to vote.’

“If you look at the outcome of the 2016 election … there were several states where the margin of victory was within 1 or 2 or 5 percent,” she continued. “If you want to change the result in a state that was determined by less than 1 percent of the votes, what is the smallest number of changes you can make, and where do you make them?”