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Mozambique: Voter Registration Extended
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
21 November 2007
Posted to the web 21 November 2007
Maputo
The Mozambican government has extended the complete re-registration of the country's electorate to 15 March 2008.
Initially, registration was to last for just 60 days, from 24 September to 22 November. But that was on the assumption that elections for provincial elections would be held on 16 January.
A constitutional amendment passed last week by the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, has made it possible to postpone these elections, and they will now probably coincide with the parliamentary and presidential elections of late 2009.
The government decree extending the voter registration period states that registration will be interrupted on 16 December for the festive season, and will resume on 14 January.
Effectively registration has been extended by a further 82 days.
This may enable the electoral bodies to recover from the disasters of the initial weeks, when most of the computers used by the voter registration brigades arrived late, and the poorly trained brigades run into continual problems in the use of computers and other digital equipment.
There was inadequate technical assistance: when computers broke down, brigades sometimes had to wait for three weeks before they were repaired. Three weeks in which they were unable to register a single voter. This problem was not restricted to remote areas, but even happened in parts of Maputo.
The Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service, estimates that the potential electorate numbers 10.5 million. But the latest figures from STAE were that, by 30 October, only 2,4 million voters had registered - less than a quarter of the STAE target.
Of course, it is unrealistic to expect any country to register 100 per cent of its potential electorate. The last time there was a complete registration of the Mozambican electorate was in 1999, and 7.1 million people registered - which, according to figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE), was about 85 per cent of all Mozambicans over the voting age of 18.
To repeat that success this time round will require registering 8.9 million voters. Falling below 7.1 million will be a disgrace, since it will mean that the electorate has shrunk.
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The government decree means that voter registration will continue during the height of the rainy season. This could cause severe logistical problems, particularly for the 40 per cent of the 3,242 brigades that are mobile and must move around large areas of the Mozambican countryside using roads that turn into quagmires during the rains.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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