Calendar for voter registration quite impossible

Maputo, 12 Jan (AIM) – It is now obvious that the calendar set by Mozambique’s National Elections Commission (CNE) for voter registration, ahead of the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for 9 October, is completely unrealistic.

The CNE set the period 1 February to 15 March for voter registration – which is during the Mozambican rainy season. The CNE is thus asking potential voters to queue up for hours in the rain. Worse still, the rains are certain to make roads impassable in parts of the country, which could make it impossible to bring registration equipment to remote areas.

The CNE knows perfectly well that registration in February is impossible, and so has made no preparations for it.

The consortium of the Lexton/Artes Grafica companies, responsible for the technical side of voter registration, will simply not have the necessary supplies and equipment ready before the start of April – a fortnight after registration is supposed to have finished.

Some equipment, used last year ahead of the municipal elections, is available and is still in working order. But additional equipment must be produced, and then transported to Mozambique. The staff required to operate the additional equipment have not yet been trained.

STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) is currently training the provincial trainers who will train members of the voter registration brigades. This task will not be completed until next Monday, 15 January.

The provincial trainers must then run the training of the registration brigades for those areas (most of the country) that do not contain municipalities. No doubt some members of the brigades that worked on registration in the municipalities last year, can be recycled this year – but opposition parties will certainly oppose this, given the strong evidence of fraud during the municipal registration.

Furthermore, voter registration cannot start without forming the District Elections Commissions and their respective branches of STAE in the non-municipal districts.

The political parties represented in parliament (the ruling Frelimo Party, and the two opposition forces. Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM) appoint members to the district commissions and the district STAEs, but no date has yet been set for swearing them into office.

It is virtually certain that the CNE will now propose that the government postpone voter registration. This will require holding an emergency sitting of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, in order to amend the electoral legislation.

The bulletin on the elections published by the anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), suggests that the CNE will propose postponing the start of voter registration to 15 March.

This will mean changing a range of other dates in the electoral calendar, including reducing the period for publishing the number of seats per parliamentary constituency from the current 180 days, and other changes to the time for registering candidates.

The Mozambican electoral legislation has grown up piecemeal over decades, and so contains contradictory deadlines. The Constitutional Council has repeatedly made the eminently sensible proposal to consolidate all the scattered electoral laws into a single, unified electoral code, but none of the political parties seems interested in the hard work this would entail.

(AIM)

Pf/ (526)