By Farai D Hove| The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Chairperson, Priscilla Chigumba has blocked members of the public from accessing the electoral roll’s database.
Speaking this week, Justice Chigumba made these statements while announcing that the electoral roll is now at about 5,4 million people.
She also made a strong apparrent admission that so far already there are duplicate entries in the database as she said that Zimbabwe is incapable of solving the problem and it will require new laws to remove them.
Software experts at Harvard University tell ZimEye that there is no way database entries can have duplicates and “this is because of the special technique of using primary keys to define each database entry. In this case the primary entry is the person’s fingerprint and there is no way a fingerprint which is the primary key can have a duplicate of itself.”
Meanwhile Chigumba is quoted by the state media saying “an amendment on removal of duplicates has been tabled before Parliament through the Electoral Amendment Bill which is still under consideration.”
Justice Chigumba said ZEC was also working on eliminating duplicate entries as well as the adjudication process.
“BVR is a method of registering voters which encompasses capturing of demographic, biometric and delimitation data.
The Commission will use the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to identify multiple registrations.
All records identified as duplicates will undergo an adjudication process to analyse and deliberate on the action to be effected.
However, an amendment on removal of duplicates has been tabled before Parliament through the Electoral Amendment Bill which is still under consideration,” said Justice Chigumba.
On the compilation and inspection of the Provisional Voters’ Roll, Justice Chigumba said the commission was looking forward to coming up with a provisional voters’ roll (PVR) this month and it will be ready for inspection from May 19-29, 2018.
“It is referred to as Provisional Voters’ Roll because it may undoubtedly contain some errors that the public may pick out for correction during inspection before it is gazetted as the final voters roll.
In fact, the inspection of the provisional voters’ roll is in itself a cleaning process as it will assist in removing errors related to addresses, date of births, wrong ID numbers, polling station postings and names,” she said.
Justice Chigumba also said an exemption list would be published and printed alongside the Provisional Voters’ Roll to educate and give registrants an opportunity to rectify any anomalies.
Justice Chigumba said the commission planned to make the provisional voters’ roll easily accessible through the use of bulk SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) Code 265.
“The ZEC will send SMS messages to all registrants who provided valid cellphone numbers confirming their demographic data and polling stations.
She said the BVR technology was for voter registration purposes only and would not be used during polling.