Accompanied voters

by Mandisa Mundawarara
29 March, 2008

The government recently announced that those requiring assistance to cast their votes would have to be accompanied by police officers, which hasn’t gone down very well with many of those requiring assistance.

On Wednesday Masimba Kuchera who is blind, filed an urgent High Court application challenging this amendment to the electoral bill, stating that it violated his constitutional rights guaranteeing him a secret vote.

Kuchera said that he was concerned about the amendment because it meant that voters like himself, who required someone to assist them in casting their votes were denied the right to secrecy, and they had no guarantees that the people who were assisting them were not partisan. “Our concern is that the commissioner of police has said that they would not be ruled by puppet, so I’m not sure that the partisan police that we have will be able to assist me in all honesty,” Kuchera said.

Masimba was informed at the voting station that he could not go ahead with his own chosen assistant but would have to be accompanied by a presiding officer, 2 police officers and 2 polling officers.

He said; “I ended up with 4 people - presiding officer, 2 polling agents and a police officer – all civil servants who have been told by their leadership to vote in a certain way so I’m unsure and I have had it recorded that I passed this vote in protest,”

He later went on to tell us that on Monday he intends to continue with his legal application at the Supreme Court. He says that the voting process is failing to take note of the availability of materials for those who are sight impaired such as Braille and large print material, so there is no reason why they should have to be accompanied in the first place.

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