By Paul Nyathi|Two Harare based companies Fidelity Printers and Printflow have been given the task to print this year’s election ballot paper.

ZEC commissioner and chairman of the Multi-party Liaison Committee (MLC) Dr Qhubani Moyo said the ballots will be printed locally in the presence of political parties and observers.

“Now that we are going to close the withdrawal of candidates, we are going for printing next week,” he said.
“The ballots are going to be printed by local companies. The Presidential ballot and the National Assembly will be printed by Fidelity Printers and the Local Government ballots will be printed by Printflow here in Harare.

“We are going to invite contesting parties and independents to come and witness the process of the printing so that we deal with certain perceptions that we have had before, in particular to deal with the issues that we have had that the paper had elements of chromatography which allows the migration of an X from one particular candidate to another. We want to satisfy ourselves that all is well so that we deal with perceptions. You see, perceptions matter in elections so we must deal with them.”

He said selected civil society organisations and observers would be allowed to witness the printing.
“Parties and selected civil society will be invited but we can’t take that whole of Zimbabwe we can only take parties candidates and selected observers,” he said.

The opposition MDC Alliance has been up in arms with ZEC demanding to know the companies that will print the ballot paper. In the 2013 elections there were serious allegations that ZANU PF rigged the elections used a special Israeli produced ballot paper to rig the elections.