24 September 2007
Maputo — The complete re-registration of the Mozambican electorate began on Monday, and is scheduled to last for 60 days, until 22 November.
There are 3,242 brigades, each composed of four people, who will undertake the registration. Each voter must prove that he or she is a Mozambican citizen of voting age (18 or above) by showing some form of legally recognised document, used for identification purposes - such as an identity card, a passport, a driving licence, a military demobilisation card, or even an old voter's card (though the old cards will not be valid for voting purposes).
Citizens who have no such documents must produce people who can bear witness to their identity. These may be two citizens already registered at the same registration post, religious or traditional authorities, or the registration body itself.
Since the full results of the August population census are not yet available, the potential size of the Mozambican electorate is not entirely clear: however, some rough calculations suggest that about 10.3 million Mozambicans are entitled to vote.
The very preliminary census figures show that 20,069,738 people were counted. If an omission rate of five per cent is assumed (about the same as in the 1997 census), then the total population is around 21.13 million.
The estimates made by the National Statistics Institute (INE) for the population in 2004 were that it was 18.7 million, of whom 9.1 million (48.66 per cent) were aged 18 and above. Apply that percentage to the 2007 figure, and the country has a potential electorate of 10.28 million.
No country ever manages to register its entire potential electorate. The last time the electorate was registered from scratch in Mozambique was in 1999, when just under 7.1 million people registered, which was 85 per cent of the estimated 8.3 million Mozambicans aged 18 and above at the time.
If this voter registration exercise is also to reach 85 per cent of potential voters, it will need to register 8.74 million people. This is an average of 45 registrations per brigade per day. Of course, in sparsely populated rural areas that figure will be considerably lower, and in cities considerably higher.
But already there are serious problems. According to a report in Monday's issue of the independent newsheet "Mediafax", registration will be unable to start in parts of the country because the necessary material has not yet reached all the districts.
This problem does not only affect remote areas. Interviewed by the private television station STV on Sunday night, a spokesman for the Maputo City Elections Commission said registration could not begin on time, because of shortage of materials, in two outlying city districts - the island of Inhaca, and the neighbourhoods of Catembe, on the other side of Maputo bay from the centre of the city.
Voters are to be registered both manually and digitally. Thus the equipment carried by each brigade includes a portable computer, a CD for the digital records, a scanner, a printer, a digital reader for voters' fingerprints, a digital camera, a battery, and a small generator.
But most brigade members are not familiar with computers.
"Mediafax" claims that the average time each member had to practice on computers was 20 minutes.
In principle, digital registration will avoid mistakes, and ensure consistency in the data. The software used allows the continual and automatic numbering of voters' cards, and will reject (through the fingerprint records) any attempt at dual registration.
At the end of the registration period, the CDs from each brigade will be sent, via the provincial capitals, to the Maputo headquarters of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the civil service.
STAE's central computer unit compares the CDs, looking for any irregularities, and then draws up the national voters' roll.
But each brigade has been instructed to keep a manual record of all registrations. It is likely that these manual registers will be used in the polling stations for the provincial elections scheduled for 16 January, while the digital records are still being processed.
STAE estimates that 473 vehicles are needed for the voter registration, yet STAE itself only owns 94. Clearly STAE will depend heavily on borrowing cars from provincial and district governments.
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