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Mozambique: Voter Registration Reaches 88 Per Cent
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
25 April 2008
Posted to the web 25 April 2008
Maputo
Mozambique's registered electorate now stands at rather more than 8.9 million people, according to Felisberto Naife, the general director of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service.
Because the previous registers were unreliable (largely due to the failure to eliminate the names of voters who had died), the entire electorate was re-registered between 24 September and 15 March (with an interval of a month for the festive season).
Interviewed in Friday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", Naife said the total number of voters was 8,926,647. This number is still provisional, in that the computerized records from the voter registration are still being checked against the hand-written records kept by the registration brigades.
The estimated total potential electorate (based on the preliminary figure from the August 2007 population census) was 10.2 million. Thus STAE has managed to register 88.3 per cent of the potential electorate.
Naife pointed out that this is better than the figure achieved the last time the entire electorate was registered, in 1999. Then 7,099,105 voters were registered out of an estimated total of 8.27 million - or 85.5 per cent.
According to Mario Ernesto, the STAE Director of Operations, 7.6 million voters were registered in the first phase, which ran from 24 September to 15 December. For the second phase, from 15 January to 15 March, STAE set itself the target of reaching a further 2.5 million voters. In fact, over these two months it registered about 1.3 million.
Ernesto noted that the torrential rains and flooding in this period, particularly in the central provinces, did not impact as severely on the voter registration as had initially been feared. "The movement of the affected people to safe areas also implied the transfer of the registration brigades to those same safe areas", he said. This also allowed STAE to issue new voters' cards to those people who had registered in the September-December period, but whose cards had been damaged or lost in the floods.
The total cost of the registration, said Naife, was over 41 million US dollars. Much of this money was spent on acquiring computers, printers, and other digital equipment used by the 3,242 brigades. For the first time voter registration was computerized at brigade level.
The brigades issued voter cards electronically, and put all the information on CD-ROMs, but at the same time everything was backed up manually. Naife argued that this gave the whole exercise greater reliability and credibility.
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Pf/ (425)
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| Copyright © 2008 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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