By Paul Nyathi|The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission began printing ballot papers for the 2018 harmonised elections on Friday morning.

The exercise began in earnest at the Fidelity Printers in Harare open to political parties’ monitoring and scrutiny for the first time.

ZimEye.com could not establish how many political parties attended the first day of printing. The exercise is expected to take up to three weeks to have all the ballot papers ready.

Fidelity Printers is running the presidential and parliamentary ballot papers while another government run company Printflow is running the local government election ballot papers.

ZimEye.com could not get an immediate comment from the main opposition the MDC Alliance. The party is the one that pushed to have ballot papers printed locally and to have political parties monitor the printing.