Zanu PF posters for the July 31 election have been put up on the Makoni South Constituency Parliamentary Information Centre notice board. Whilst clearly it’s tempting advertising space, surely that’s the kind of space that should advertise equally for all parties, or none. A public service. Oh, like the public broadcaster, ZBC. Right.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.  – Rilke

As Zimbabwe prepares for the 31 July election, a subscriber in Raffingora shares this unverified report of political violence in  Mashonaland West.

A Zanu PF war vet by the name Yondo has beaten a supporter of a independent candidate Mai Chombo today, 11 July at Raffingora Business Centre. She was accompanied by other war vets, whose names are Kangachepe Kufaingano and Mutokoti Vongai.

Wednesday, 10 July
In the afternoon, a stone’s throw away from a big fat 4×4 with a SADC Observer sticker on it, a woman and her two dogs browse curios for sale at a market in Newlands. Election, what election?

Thursday, 11 July
As Harare wakes up, there are some signs of life from the two main political parties as election posters start to appear on the street. But they are far outnumbered by bright yellow posters advertising a night of stand-up comedy at a local theatre. Then again maybe that’s exactly what these elections are. Kombis – the people’s taxi service – have started to mobile message the election.

At the moment, if you go onto the official Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) website, you can download a list of all the polling stations in the country, arranged by province. This would be great if the document wasn’t almost completely useless!

On opening the document, a 632-page PDF file, you find that the table (which should display where you can vote for your respective constituency) is too wide for the document, and so none of the information is lined up correctly, making all the information irrelevant. The important part (the bit about where you can vote) is all at the bottom rather than lined up with the correct constituency – it could have been a 316-page document.

Therefore, to work out where to vote you’d have to print the entire document and match up the lines of the table (not that the table is complete) or, do as I did and copy and paste the entire document (page by page) into various different programs before finally getting all the correct information in the right place. Speaking from experience, this takes 5 solid hours (not including the extra time spent trying to work out what some of the words are meant to say).

It shouldn’t be this hard to find out where to vote.

It’s going to be an interesting election!

Benefit from Emily’s copy/pasting, make your life easier, and access the spreadsheets of the polling stations as Excel files on our website. – Ed