Kubatana has opened up its Election SMS line for voters’ feedback and election nyayas. Here are some of their messages:

If the soldiers have already voted, what are they doing today on this public holiday?

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It is clear they are aready rigging. Pasina izvozvo ZANU haihwinhi. We need to plan way forward not kuenda kucourt kwavo. (Zanu PF won’t win. We need to play way forward, not go back and challenge this election in court.)

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How can the ZEC claim the elections will be free and fair when they order ballot papers that are not equal to the number net registered voters.

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Ko mapurisa 5 anodei paPolling station imhosva here kuvhota. (Why do we need five police officers at a polling station? Is it a crime to vote?)

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The Army have moved Tanks frm Inkomo Barracks, why?

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There is a war chopper since Wednesday roving n the skies nearer to the ground in Mutoko its frightening.

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Their rigging machinery is now defunct & malfunctioning. Their days are numbered! The masses say NO! The aged dictator’s time is nigh, darkness overshadows him.

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Airforce jets overflying Masvingo of the past 2days.intimidation of the opposition.

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Really Zim will be alive from tomorrow. Our vote will be change not for blood – peace shall reign.

Going to bed last night on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 2008 Harmonised Election, I sent a text message to a friend of mine: How often does a dictator concede power in an election?

I woke up this morning to his reply – Rarely. This election is just one of many phases. But as he said, it is also a part of the thrill, the rush of being on that white water and hearing the thunder roaring in the distance.

So despite my better judgement, I’ve suspended my cynicism for the day, and I’ve been enjoying the rush of looking at polling stations, watching groups of people walking down the road and being certain that they’re all on their way to the same place – the polling station nearest them. On my bike this morning, I was relieved to see that the voting queues in the Avenues were longer than the bread queues. Or the ATM queues.

And I’m not the only one caught up in this sense of excitement. I watched a group of teenaged boys jump out the car in their bare feet, untie a Simba Makoni flyer from a tree on the side of the road, and smile victoriously as he ran back down to the car waving his prize in the air. I got a text message from a friend of mine at 6:30. She was already at her polling station, she told me, and there were about 200 people there. Ten minutes later I heard from someone else on the other side of town – a hundred people at his polling station, complete with deck chairs, flasks, a festive picnic atmosphere. Surreal he told me.

And in a way he’s entirely right. There is such spectacle, such drama and performance associated with the process through which we choose the people to represent us. The songs and the rallies, the t-shirts and the posters. All whips up to this tremendous sense of excitement and anticipation and What If notions of possibility and hope. That sense that maybe, just maybe, this one day will make all the difference.

Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. I found a voter education flyer on the side of the road this morning, spelling out just how complicated the process of voting for four different offices – and putting these papers into four different ballot boxes – can be. Apparently at one polling station in a low-density suburb of Bulawayo, it took them 45 minutes to process 13 voters. In Harare, one foreign-born citizen was turned away from the polling station and told he had to go get the paperwork proving that he had renounced his foreign citizenship before he could vote.

But there’s a sense of purpose today, a vibe, an anticipation and smell of promise that Some Thing might just happen.

Campaigning has been interesting. Everyone now seems to be happy to say to me, “Mugabe must go,” which last elections everyone felt, but no one dared to say. Everyone however, wants ‘something’ for their vote. Tshirt, loaf of bread, beer. This worries me. Zimbabweans are going to hand over the running of their city and country to ‘someone’ for the next five years, and they will give it to you for $12million (a loaf of bread). No wonder the country is in chaos. No one seems to pay attention, or care, to who is running their affairs.

On the other hand, support is huge, and varied. Thursday, walking back from the shops (not even campaigning), someone unknown to me shouts from across the street, “Hi”, then “Don’t ever give up”.

From everything I have seen (all the way to Nyanga and back), the MDC (Tsvangirai) is massively popular. The Mugabe Zanu PF is massively unpopular. Zanu PF will steal the election again – they have to, they cannot go without a fight, so what is the opposition’s Plan B? I suspect they are going to sit down and discuss it again, as they did last time. So I am feeling a tad depressed. However, we play the part we can play. Which for you means, get out there and vote. Just by physically standing in a voting queue will mean that you have impact.

So everything is feeling quite festive here in Harare the day before our Harmonised Election. The posters are everywhere, and they add so much colour to the place. There’s people in all sorts of election T-shirts everywhere, and I’m beginning to wish that every week was election week. Things just feel so much more possible.

On the road yesterday, I spotted a whole lot of MDC (Tsvangirai) graffiti, especially on the roads and on the kerbs of the roundabouts. And I wondered if the youth on the MDC spray paint team are cursing the day the MDC split – Vote MDC is just so much easier to write than Vote MDC Tsvangirai! Quicker, uses less paint, and runs you less risk of getting caught in the process. Maybe it’s high time each of the MDC factions chose their own names.

Running this morning, I noticed a $500 bill on the grass on the side of the road. Wet and abandoned, clearly not worth enough for anyone to bother picking it up. The other day, my colleague and I were distributing papers in Harare’s Avenues suburb. I spotted two $100,000 notes on top of the post boxes in one of the blocks of flats – again, so worthless it was just spare change lying there.

But if Mugabe’s biggest opponent in this election is inflation, Tsvangirai’s is the vote rigging which began long back. These elections are being held under such patently unfair and unequal conditions, they’ve been stolen before a single vote has been cast.

So, like Bev Clark was asking yesterday, what’s the plan to defend our vote? At the MDC’s rally on Saturday, Tsvangirai also stressed the importance of defending the vote. But what does that look like, really? I had my bag snatched a few years ago. I screamed like hell, I swore a blue streak at the muggers, and kicked at them when they tried to grope me as well. Imagine if we felt that passionately about protecting our vote.

One of our subscribers wrote in with this recommendation for defending the vote:

How about bombarding Mbeki, Zuma, Guebuza and other influential SADC leaders with examples of ZANU PF’s disrespect for democracy and human rights and demanding action? If hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans write or e-mail these leaders, giving examples of why they are wrong to support Mugabe in his misrule of Zimbabwe they will at least not be able to deny knowledge of the worst atrocities or to claim that these people are in power by the choice of the people of Zimbabwe, and may be persuaded to apply meaningful pressure for change.

This is a good idea, and I do have a soft spot for letter writing campaigns. But what about the campaign here? Surely the president of South Africa or Mozambique is more likely to listen to Zimbabweans’ need for change if they can see us actively doing something to express our frustration here – not simply running to outsiders for help? It’s been one of my continuing frustrations – that we turn to the courts, or South Africa, or SADC for help, rather than reclaiming our vote ourselves.

So yes, I’ve let myself get a bit swept away by the hype and the music and the colours and the anticipation. But deep down I know that, as important as 29 March is, even more important is what we do, collectively and individually, when that vote is stolen, like I know it will be.

Times might be tense here in Zimbabwe but hey, you’ve got to have a laugh – just don’t press 1 for Zanu PF. To listen to this audio spoof, click here

It’s less than 24 hours before e-day and I’m wondering to myself why I don’t feel as excited as most of my colleagues. I mean this is the mother of all elections, and the anticipation and the need for change that ought to be infectious seems to be having no effect on me. Not intending to cloud everyone else’s excitement though I’ll tell you how I feel. I have this greatest sense of foreboding. Yeah, a couple of my friends are convinced I’m just a natural pessimist but I tell you, this cloud hanging over me is so real – nothing to do with pessimism this.

Why do I feel this way? Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I’m afraid of disappointment, or if by some lucky streak, “change” does hit us, will it be more of the same old? I’m kind of finding it hard to imagine that should Bob lose the election, he’d be out of State House in exactly 72hours.

I’m afraid of all kinds of things that may happen, the irony of the possibility of finally having Zimbabwe’s life president ousted, even though he swore it would never happen in his lifetime. I’ll tell you what would more ironic than that though. It is having the little known, much underestimated Langton Towungana win the presidential race.

I wonder if I’m the only one who feels strange . . .