Weeding Out Names from the Voters’ List

The purpose of re-registration is to clean up the voters list. As of April, there are two hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and two persons on the list and the Elections and Boundaries Department project that when the exercise is finished, there will be some two hundred thousand registered voters. But how will the department do the verifications and ensure the list is clean? Tamai explains that there will be home visits and other measures in place.

Josephine Tamai

Josephine Tamai, Chief Elections Officer, Elections & Boundaries Department

“We also have to go out and conduct investigations. Not just because a person comes in to lodge their application, means that the person’s name will be on the list. So, again, I want to advise persons that Elections and Boundaries staff will be out conducting investigations. These investigations will be happening simultaneously, so from the first week of July persons will see officers out conducting investigation. We ask the cooperation of everybody to give us information. Sometimes people are reluctant to give us information in terms of who resides where but as citizens we all have a duty and the only way we can conduct proper investigation is if we get support from general public.  Remember we mentioned, passport, birth certificates, nationality certificates, those are documents that are issued by other entities, other departments. We have already met with those persons from those departments. We have already gotten commitments from those departments that in terms of verification, they will be verifying information for us on a daily basis. We are even exploring the avenue where we will be given access to the information at two different levels; somebody will verify and somebody will do the approvals for us to ensure that whatever questions or queries we have, they will be provide that information. Yes we will be asking persons to bring in original documents but if we have anything that is questionable, we will pass it on to those organizations and they will have staff assigned solely for elections and boundaries purposes. At the registration centers, which are normally the polling stations, the political parties who have representation in the House of Representatives and who intend to contest an election, they will have scrutineers in those registration centers, as well. We have met with them already and we have agreed that for all documentation that needs to be queried, they will be allowed to come to the elections and boundaries department and view the verification process to satisfy themselves that this information has been verified. Remember it is a process because once the registers have been published, then persons have fourteen days with which to view those registers and make objections.”

Penalties for persons providing false information at residents and when registering can include fines of five hundred to one thousand dollars, as well as imprisonment or combination.