Democratisation and securitisation of Zimbabwe’s national elections: opportunities and challenges of biometric voter reg istration

Abstract

This article discusses opportunities and challenges of Zimbabwe adopting the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) given the long history of teething problems with the security, integrity, credibility and legitimacy of national elections. Zimbabwe has had disputed elections since the emergence of competitive elector al politics in 2000. Perennially, the losing opposition parties, mostly MDC-T party, has rejected election results and, on several occasions, approached courts of law seeking for the nullification of elections citing allegations of irregularities including flaws in voter registration, double voting and fraud. The general view held by the opposition has always been that there exists a grey area that the ruling ZANU-PF party has historically manipulated. This article asserts that some of the challenges appear to have stemmed from the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission’s (ZEC’s) reliance on an archaic voter’s roll, whose shortcomings justified calls for the adoption of the BVR in 2017 to possibly clean the defective voters roll and to improve the integrity, credibility, acceptability and legitimacy of the electoral process. This article relies on existent literature to investigate opportunities and challenges for adopting the BVR as a modest voter registration system meant to bring about political democratisation through securitisation of Zimbabwean elections. Accordingly, the article holds that the improvement of voter registration system should enhance democracy in Zimbabwe