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Zimbabweans yesterday voted peacefully and soberly with the police reporting no incidents, and at most polling stations the measures by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission meant that voters were processed quickly and accurately and did not have to wait long to cast their votes.

However, there were those delays in opening a modest, but significant group of polling stations in Harare and Bulawayo because of the late arrival of the ballot papers for the local authority elections in the wards served by those stations.

Voters remained waiting patiently, but the late arrival was something ZEC should have been able to sort out.

The whole process of printing the roughly 18 million ballot papers needed for the harmonised elections did start late with the court cases largely involving one presidential candidate and a slate of National Assembly candidates in Bulawayo.

In future, ZEC clearly need to appoint a second printer, at least for back-up, but perhaps in any case could split the work between the three elections for President, National Assembly and local authorities.

It would probably not be a good idea to split the work for, say, the Parliamentary election ballot papers between two printers, but all papers for one of the polls could be printed by a single printer.

The arrangements for multiple printers should be flexible enough that if one printer has a serious production problem more work can be moved to the other.

This would seem to be an administrative matter that ZEC could make on its own authority without seeking changes to the Electoral Act.

The administrative process would obviously require prior expression of interest so ZEC could ensure that printers willing to do the work had adequate security arrangements in place, but this does not seem impossible.

Another solution that could have worked yesterday was to allow the Presidential and National Assembly elections to go ahead on time in those polling station where the ward ballot papers were late, and bring the voters back on another day to elect their city councils or at least elect the councillors in the wards where polls could have been postponed.

This would require amendments to the Electoral Act and possibly the Constitution. But the Electoral Act already makes provision for another likely delay, the death of a nominated candidate between nomination day and polling day.

This provision had to be used in yesterday’s harmonised poll in one constituency and four local authority wards.

The voters in those five groups of polling stations yesterday voted for President and in the other election that could go ahead, and just have to come back on another day to vote for their MP or councillor, in a process that is similar, although legally different, to a by-election.

The Electoral Act in any case will see some more amendments in the next Parliament.

There were some other serious amendment suggestions made in recent debate in the National Assembly, largely on making voter registration almost automatic when people apply for their national identity documents. That had a lot of support from both sides of the National Assembly.

Presumably all members of the new Parliament will be keen on smoother and better electoral processes, regardless of their party, so that the new Parliament can debate all that we have learned at leisure and see how we make our processes better.

It just seems that ZEC did not foresee this problem in time, since the commission had learned from past elections and had made organisational changes, basically boosting staff at polling stations and splitting voters at each station into ever smaller groups based on their family name, so as to speed up the voting process.

In fact, outside that group of metropolitan wards, the process was so efficient and smooth that by mid afternoon most voters had already voted and the polling stations were just having a trickle of those who had waited a bit before closing 12 hours after                                                                 opening.

There were some other oddities yesterday, although not of the making of the commission or any recognised authority.

Someone had dumped a few small bundles of a little badly-produced leaflet in a few parts of Harare that purported to be a message from the CCC calling on people not to vote.

It was so obviously a fake that no one took any notice, but still the police need to track down the perpetrator and the printer and bring them to court.

No one had even tried to distribute these leaflets, just dumping the small pile.

There were also reports that the CCC had difficulty finding enough willing election agents to take advantage of its legal right to have three agents at every polling station, one inside and two outside and the duty inside agent being allowed to witness the counting process as well.

This was surprising, but is an internal party matter.

Everyone is now waiting for the results, and we need to wait in patience as the long complex process of reconciling ballot papers is done, so every ballot paper can be accounted for whether it was used, marked, folded and put in a box, or was left over.

And these checks also ensure that the number of ballot papers that are in the ballot boxes equal the number of people that voted. Only then can the counting even start.

Results from each polling station have to go to a collation station, where the votes for each candidate in the ward election and then the National Assembly election are added together to find who are the councillors and the MP, and then the Presidential ballots have to be collated to find the national winner. Communications are continually improving but are not instant.

We have all shown our maturity in the run-up to the election and on the voting day, so the same patience needs to be shown as the polling officers continue doing their job to find out who is the winner in each ward, each constituency and in the nation at large.