Alright. So my cynicism is officially unsuspended. As Zimbabwe’s election day has progressed, reports indicate increasingly that, aside from a few areas in Harare and Mutare’s high density suburbs, voter turn out has been low- or at least the queues have been very short, despite the fact that analysts predicted long queues in urban areas due to a dearth of polling stations. The MDC’s Director of Elections, Tendai Biti, is asking for voting to be extended, but it sounds like there is only a small number of polling stations for which this might be necessary.

I went for a run this evening, and found myself checking people’s little fingers for the tale-tale sign of pink ink – to indicate that someone had voted. I was dismayed to see not one pink finger.

I bumped into a neighbour of mine who had moved house some time back. I was surprised to see her, and I asked if she had come back because she had registered here and wanted to vote. She’s 19, so this would have been the first election she could vote in. She just laughed at me. She didn’t vote, she said, because she never had time to register.

Listening to ZBC (Zanu PF Broadcasting Corporation) news on the radio, it sounds like they’re claiming high turn out in the rural areas, but low turn out for the cities. The MDC has scheduled a press conference for 1am – apparently they think some results will already be in by then. Is apathy going to end up the biggest winner in this election?

This entry was posted on March 29th, 2008 at 7:01 pm by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.