TICHAONA CHIMINYA, a driver for the leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, was burnt alive in a truck. David Stevens, a white farmer, was shot in the back of the head.

The men were among the first to die as President Mugabe’s reign of terror unrolled five years ago. But their names are still on the voters’ roll.

Supporters of the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change say that up to a million phantom voters may appear on the register and that “ghost voters” will be used by the ruling Zanu (PF) party to inflate the votes that it receives in Thursday’s parliamentary elections.

Added to a campaign to deny food to opponents of President Mugabe and door-to-door intimidation of rural voters, the MDC fears that it may lose the election, even if it has the support of the majority of voters.

Last week Tobaiwa Mudede, the registrar-general who has run all of Mr Mugabe’s electoral victories since 1985, announced that there were 5.7 million voters on the roll.

Topper Whitehead, who runs a pro-democracy group called Freezim and who helped to detail irregularities in the 2002 presidential elections, analysed a sample of between 500 and 2,500 registered voters in 12 of the 120 constituencies.

Mr Whitehead estimates that 78 per cent of people who have died in Zimbabwe since 1980 are still registered to vote.

House-to-house checks revealed that nearly half of the voters in the sample had never been heard of at their addresses listed on the roll and the duplication of names was common.

Mr Whitehead said that a conservative extrapolation of the statistics gave a total of 2.6 million “ghost” and duplicate voters, and a voters’ roll that in reality is closer to 3.1 million. “There is only one way he can win — by stuffing the ballot boxes,” he said. “You need a heavily inflated number of voters so that a huge fake turnout doesn’t look unreasonable.”

In 2002 opposition researchers found that at rural polling stations where it had election agents, about 300 voters were casting ballots on each day. In the handful of stations that were unstaffed, however, the count went up to 1,500 a day.

The MDC has never been able to prove that fake balloting influenced the 2002 elections and the Government insists that there is nothing wrong with the electoral roll.

Yet Mr Mudede has defied three court orders to let the opposition officials review used ballot papers, counterfoils and lists of checked-in voters from the last presidential election.

This time a small number of observers, the cutting of the election from three days to one, the doubling of polling stations to more than 8,000 and the near-impossibility of the MDC training more than 32,000 election agents – four per polling station – have all worked in the ruling party’s favour.

And the Opposition insists that in an electoral system whose senior officials are personally appointed by Mr Mugabe, where polling stations are manned by civil servants, including soldiers and policemen, and independent scrutiny will be limited, required results can be made to order.

Independent observers accused the electoral authorities in 2002 of invented results. Officers from the 120 constituency centres telephoned their results to the “national command centre” — an operations room which passed them on to be broadcast. Lawyers who tried to enter the centre were threatened at gunpoint.

New electoral legislation passed in January abolishes the command centre. Counting is to be done at each polling station and the results telephoned to a constituency centre. However, instead of the command centre, there is now a “national election logistics centre” with obscure functions and whose existence is not legislated.

While the lead-up to the election has been peaceful, there have been widespread reports that rural voters are being told that they will be punished after the election for voting for the Opposition.

Village chiefs have been told to accompany their people to the voting stations to put pressure on them to vote for Zanu (PF). Voters have been told that it will be easy to see who they voted for, as the new ballot boxes are transparent.

There have been repeated reports of food being used as a way of forcing people to vote for the ruling party. In some areas it is difficult to buy grain without a Zanu (PF) membership card.

Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, accused President Mugabe’s regime on Saturday of using food in the drought-ravaged Matabeleland region in southwest Zimbabwe to coerce the electorate to vote for it in Thursday’s general elections.

Yesterday the President responded by calling Archbishop Ncube a mad, inveterate liar. “He has been lying for the past two years,” he said.

But some people say that some of the rigging has already started. Three million Zimbabweans who have left the country – and could be expected to support the Opposition – have been banned from voting. The 200,000-strong uniformed services have already voted by postal ballot. Party election agents and observers are barred from the process.

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