Multiple Registrants Removed From Voters Register
Malawi Electoral Commission MEC has said 13,244 multiple registrants removed from voters register during cleaning up exercise.
Speaking during a press briefing chairperson of Malawi Electoral Commission Justice Dr Jane Ansah said for everyone who registered more than once they have maintained the first registration and deleted all the subsequent ones.
MEC Chair explained that with the removal of the multiple registrants, the figures were supposed to go down but in the course of building the voters’ register it was discovered that some figures were not captured correctly in the preliminary statistics that were released.
“It was possible to have people register at more than one centre when we were conducting voter registration because each registration kit was a standalone station,” Dr Ansah
She further said there were variations with the initial figures released before and because of this the counts for Salima, Mchinji, Dedza, Mangochi, Balaka and Mulanje went up.
Dr Ansah added the majority of the variations were due to operators capturing registrants using the wrong centre.
However, Dedza is a special case because upon close of phase one of voter registration and after the upload of the data it was noted that five centres did not reflect any data while one centre Mgawi 1 did not upload fully.
Dr Ansah revealed that six hundred and fifty three records had not been captured from various districts in the initial upload.
She said “due to the removal of multiple registrations the final count of registered voters is 6,859,375 and has gone up by 3,080 voters overall.”
Ansah has assured Malawians that of the 6.8 million voters registered by MEC there are no double registrants because of biometric system.
Meanwhile, the Commission has finished printing of the preliminary voters’ register that is being displayed for the voter verification exercise.
The Commission is urging all electoral stakeholders to encourage people to turnout in large numbers for the voter exercise.
