HARARE, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) said Monday a provisional voters roll for the upcoming poll is expected to be out in six weeks.
This follows the completion of the mobile bio-metric voter registration exercise that ended on Feb. 8.
ZEC chairperson Priscilla Chigumba told a parliamentary committee on justice that the elections body was currently in the process of cleaning up voter registration data after which it would carry out a de-duplication exercise to weed out double registrants.
She said the de-duplication process was expected to take time.
"The credibility of the elections hinges on the authenticity of the voters' roll. We are not going to hurry the (de-duplication) process because we need to produce a credible voters' roll. So a provisional voters' roll may only be out after about six weeks from now," she said.
About 5.3 million people have so far registered to vote in the polls that are set for mid this year.
Chigumba decried limited funding, saying this could hamper the elections body from effectively discharging its mandate.
Out of the 148 million U.S. dollars requested by the elections body, the government has so far released only 98 million U.S. dollars, she said.
She said contrary to opposition claims that ZEC was staffed by many military personnel, only 15 percent were former members of the military. These had been recruited more than six years ago, she said.
The opposition in the country has been calling for de-militarization of ZEC, alleging that many of its workers were members of the security forces.
Chigumba said ZEC was not prohibited by law from recruiting retired, former members of the security forces.
The opposition has also voiced concern on what it calls militarization of the whole electoral process but Chigumba refuted this, saying it had not recruited any serving members of the security forces in recent times due to a government freeze on new recruitment.
On the Diaspora vote that the opposition is clamoring for, Chigumba said this will not be possible because the law does not cater for the vote.
"There is no discrimination against people living in the Diaspora. What is there is a new constitution whose provisions have just come into force with the implementation of our first biometric voter registration.
"What that constitution provides for is this; the constitution has now provided for polling station, specific ward-based registration and voting. So somebody in the Diaspora will not be able to vote from there because they will not have been allocated a polling station for them to vote here in Zimbabwe," she said.
She said the country was in the pre-election phase and that most electoral processes will be triggered by the proclamation of the election date by the president.
Chigumba said according to law, the elections must be held between July 31 and Aug. 31, unless Parliament is dissolved earlier in terms of the constitution.