Election Day
Voting began at 7 am on 29 March and continued for 12 hours, with polling stations closing at 7 pm, although voters who were still in line at that point were allowed to continue voting. Turnout was reported to be somewhat low, and according to police the voting was for the most part calm and peaceful, although the home of a ZANU-PF parliamentary candidate in Bulawayo was bombed.
Mugabe, voting in Harare, said: "We are not in the habit of cheating. We don't rig elections." According to Mugabe, his conscience would not let him sleep at night if he tried to rig the election. Tsvangirai also voted in Harare, saying that he was certain of victory "in spite of the regime's attempt to subvert the will of the people"; he also claimed that the election could not be considered free and fair even if the MDC won. For his part, Makoni predicted that he would win with a score even higher than the 72% he had previously predicted.
The MDC said that ballot papers ran out at a polling station in Mt Dzuma constituency and in Wards 29 and 30 of Makoni South constituency (both constituencies in Manicaland). It also claimed that the indelible ink used for voting could be removed with detergent. Biti said that there was "absolutely no doubt we have won this election".
Some Zimbabweans living in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa held protests and mock voting in response to their exclusion from the election.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) on 28 March admitted that the voters' roll to be used in the elections was "in shambles" after the opposition had unearthed 8,000 voters who according to the roll, were "normally resident" in a block that has no buildings and a shack that had 75 registered voters. This was in Hatcliffe alone.
The ZEC allegedly contravened the Electoral Act by failing to make available to the MDC a hard copy of the roll.
Read more about this topic: Zimbabwean Presidential Election, 2008
Famous quotes containing the words election day, election and/or day:
“What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)