{{Nearly 305,000 Zimbabwean voters were turned away and 206,000 received assistance from election officials during last week’s disputed vote, the state-appointed election commission says.}}
Thursday’s revelation followed reports by independent poll monitors of widespread manipulation of the voters’ roll and irregularities in the elections that President Robert Mugabe won with 61 percent of the vote.
Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s challenger, won 34 percent of the vote and has called the elections “fraudulent”. He said he would seek legal redress.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said nearly 3.5 million people cast their ballots in the July 31 polls, which extended Mugabe’s 33-year rule and ended a unity government formed in 2009 in which Tsvangirai was prime minister.
The commission’s statistics showed the largest number of voters – 64,483 – were turned away in the capital Harare.
Urban areas have long been a stronghold of Mugabe’s rival Tsvangirai.
Regular voters were reportedly turned away because their names were missing from the voters’ roll, they were registered in another ward or they did not have adequate identification.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) said over 750,000 urban voters were missing from the electoral list, in what they described as “a systematic effort to disenfranchise an estimated million voters”.
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