Election management body, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) on Tuesday vowed to conduct a free, fair and credible plebiscite urging the electorate to put its weight behind the organisation.

Briefing journalists in the capital, ZEC Acting Chairperson, Commissioner Emmanuel Magade said although not everyone can have access to the Bio-metric Voter Registration (BVR) servers, the public needs to put its trust in the commission as it has an obligation to present a good and non-contentious election.

“We are confident that come election time, we will have a good product that will be less controversial and will make everyone happy.

“What people however, need to do, is to trust us with the BVR servers and their information as we have proven, thus far, to be a credible organisation. We are impartial and objective.

“We can not allow everyone to have access to the servers as this will again haunt us in the process. If something happens, we will be held accountable so it is safe that the servers be kept at our offices and we will allow a few stakeholders to have access to the servers,” said Magade.

He said data collected during electronic voter registration will be stored in tamper-proof flash drives before the information is fed into a central data base which is hack-proof.

Meanwhile, Magade said ZEC the commission has revised its initial target of seven million voters to 5,5 million voters due to the slow registration process.

ZEC had set a target of 7 million voters when the BVR process started in 2017.

“We have been forced to revise our initial target due to a number of factors, chief among them being the slow progress but we are happy with where we are and the progress made.

“We hope that by the time we get to the nomination stage, we would have registered more than 5,5 million voters,” noted Magade.

The commission has extended the voter registration exercise to afford an opportunity for everyone to vote.

A total of 2850 mobile and 87 static registration centers have been established while 446 kits have been deployed for the exercise which will run from 10 January to 8 February.