Thread: Voter's Registration Figure Questionable

The DTA of Namibia wants to reiterate that the rigging of elections begins with the registration of voters. It is very clear that the Directorate of Elections is unwilling to learn from its mistakes. As recently as December last year, the Opposition parties decided to boycott the by-election in the Tobias Hainyeko constituency. The reason for this was because the registration of voters had been unacceptable to the parties. The DTA would have liked to believe that the ECN would have learnt from this mistake and would have made its system completely transparent this time around, but clearly this is not the case.

In the light of information received from the Directorate of Elections and as we will now demonstrate, it is clear that they have no idea of how many new voters were registered during the supplementary registration process, and how many duplicates and changes of address were registered.

On 8 October 2009 the DTA of Namibia requested from Mr Ndjarakana the statistics of the supplementary registration process. On the same day the DTA received an email containing the provisional stats of the supplementary process which is attached to this press release as annexure A. On October 14 2009 the DTA again requested the final stats of the supplementary registration process. On the 15th October we received the following message from the ECN: “I’m afraid, Sir, that the info I attached to my earlier email is the only one available. Unfortunately this is all we got from the field.”

According to the ECN’s earlier press release 290 000 new voters were registered. However, according to the stats we received on 8 October, 306 482 new applications, duplicates and changes of address were registered during the supplementary registration process. Unfortunately, only in the case of 2 regions the breakdown between new applications, duplicates and changes of address are available. For the rest of the regions, no breakdowns are available. And in the case of the Oshana region only a total is given – no figures for the different constituencies is given. It is therefore impossible to determine how many new applications were actually registered during the supplementary registration process.

The DTA of Namibia believes that according to the law, the parties have the right to know exactly how many new registrations took place, how many were duplicates and how many changes of address are included in the figures provided by the Directorate of Elections.

The fact is also that the Directorate of Elections provided the political parties with an electronic voters’ roll, but in a PDF-format, which makes it impossible to work with in any sensible way. When asked for a useable copy, the Directorate suggested that each party should get hold of the necessary computer software to convert the file back to Excel or some other programme. Since all this will take time, if it is even possible, the DTA of Namibia urgently requests the Directorate of Elections to extend the deadline of Friday to at least Wednesday next week to give the parties more time to scrutinise the voters’ information as provided to them on Monday.

Johan de Waal
Chairman: DTA of NAMIBIA