Dar es Salaam. Zanzibar Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced Monday that the general election in the semi-autonomous archipelago will be held on Wednesday, October 29, 2025. It’ll be the seventh election since the reintroduction of the multi-party political system in 1992.
The announcement follows the dissolution of the Zanzibar House of Representatives on August 13, 2025, a step that paved the way for the electoral process to begin per the law. The General Election will involve the election of the President of Zanzibar, Members of the House of Representatives, and councillors.
ZEC also announced that early voting will take place on Tuesday, October 28, 2025, one day before the main election day. This early voting will include election supervisors, assistants, police officers on duty during the election, commission members, commission staff, and voters assigned security and management roles at polling stations.
The decision by the authorities in Zanzibar to retain the early voting system signifies a major setback for the efforts of opposition parties and other democracy stakeholders on the island, who have been vocally advocating for the removal of this system from Zanzibar’s election laws.
Their goal has been to ensure that elections are conducted in an environment of freedom and fairness.
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Among the key players driving this push was the opposition party ACT Wazalendo, a member of the ruling Government of National Unity (GNU) in Zanzibar. The party has long condemned the early voting system as a tool for electoral fraud, claiming it robs Zanzibaris of their fundamental right to freely choose their leaders.
“Our duty is to defend the Zanzibar Constitution—as we swore in our oath—to fight for justice and serve the people,” Othman Masoud Othman, ACT Wazalendo’s national chairperson and the party’s Zanzibar presidential candidate, said in 2024. “Therefore, we declare: ‘early voting will not return to Zanzibar.’”
Many stakeholders had also hoped that the early voting system would be scrapped as part of the reforms proposed by President Hussein Mwinyi’s Task Force on November 3, 2022. The committee had presented multiple recommendations to enhance Zanzibar’s multi-party electoral framework, yet the authorities failed to act on most of them.
Among its key proposals, the task force called for reforming Zanzibar’s election laws to ensure transparency in appointing the ZEC Chairperson and commissioners—urging that vacancies be publicly advertised so that competent and qualified individuals could apply.
It further recommended creating an independent selection committee to receive applications and vet candidates for these critical roles. To date, not a single one of these reforms has been enacted.
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The early voting mechanism was instituted in 2018 through limited revisions to Zanzibar’s electoral laws, permitting polling officials, security personnel, and election commission staff to vote ahead of time—ostensibly to ensure they could manage election day without distraction. In the 2020 general election, early voting occurred on October 27.
The 2020 elections that brought Dr Mwinyi to power for his first term were marred by multiple incidents of violence and electoral misconduct, including reports of 13 fatalities, as documented in the 2021 Human Rights Watch report.
Additionally, 102 individuals were allegedly injured through beatings and attacks by security forces, while approximately 199 ACT-Wazalendo members were arrested and detained across various parts of Zanzibar.
Many observers linked these crackdowns to the government’s insistence on retaining the controversial early voting system, which opposition groups argue facilitated electoral manipulation.
However, Zanzibar’s electoral authorities have firmly maintained that the early voting system will remain unchanged, while pledging to take all necessary measures to ensure the islands’ elections are conducted in a free and fair environment.
Speaking on August 12, 2025, during the opening of a training session for assistant returning officers, ZEC’s Director of Elections, Thabit Idarous Faina, declared that the electoral law remains unchanged and will govern the upcoming election.
