Electoral commission certifies 2021 voters’ register |01 April 2021

Ms Bilal (left) hands over the certified voters’ register to Ms Amesbury (Photo: Joena Meme)

The Electoral Commission of Seychelles yesterday certified the 2021 voters’ register, in accordance with Section 9 (1) of the Elections Act 1995.

It was chief registration officer of the commission Lynn Bilal who officially certified the register, before presenting a copy to chief electoral officer Manuella Amesbury, during a brief ceremony at the commission’s headquarters at Sacos Tower, Victoria.

As explained by Ms Bilal, the register applies for transactions recorded between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020, and there are 74,442 registered voters on the register. The only difference between the newly certified register and that used for the elections (2020) is the new additions in the period following the elections up to December 2020, as well as the removal of persons who are deceased from the register.

“For the elections, the register was closed in August 2020, and then it was reopened in November 2020. In total, we have received 88 new applications during this period when the register was reopened up to December. Of them, we have nine new applications, 11 transfers, one from the category for persons effecting a transfer or a change of name, one deletion and we consulted that during the last month when the register was open before the elections, we saw a surge in the number of applications that we received, so we consulted that there may have been human errors on the register. So we conducted an exercise whereby we reviewed all of these applications, and we identified 66 entries which we corrected,” said Ms Bilal.

Still according to Ms Bilal, human errors include typos, while deletions apply where a deceased person has not been captured on the list submitted to the commission by the department of civil status, requiring the commission to submit a formal enquiry to the department, prior to taking the necessary action. Two hundred deceased persons have also been removed from the voters’ register.

“According to the law, as chief registration officer, I need to revise the register at least once a year. We do it on March 31, but the work is ongoing throughout the year but it is certified just once in a non-election year, but if an election is announced, then we need to go through another certification process,” she added.

Ms Bilal went on to note that the commission is striving to address issues over which there was public outcry in the past, including the apparition of deceased persons on the register, by working closely with the department of civil status, and conducting regular checks on the register to cross-check against the list from civil status, although this process can also be challenging on account of the absence of a digital database.

In addition to having to manually verify and cross-check information, the Covid-19 pandemic has posed challenges for the commission, causing delays in the registration, verification and publication procedure in approving applications. As a result, 10 applications were not verified in time for certification, while a further two applications were verified too late, and therefore could not be published on time for the certification. As such, the 12 new additions will only be reflected in the next register to be certified.

Given the economic crisis brought about by the pandemic, the commission has also been forced to adjust its services to render its operations more efficient. Rather than have registration offices across different regions, the commission has centralised it service to its headquarters, and through an office on La Digue, and another on Praslin.

In concluding, Ms Bilal urged the 3,663, or 33 percent of first time voters who are eligible to participate in the electoral process to register for the important responsibility.

“Last year when we closed the register, just for August, we received 3,189 applications. Of them, we had 1,775 first-time voters. Historically, it has been very difficult to engage with first-time voters even if we have done a lot of targeted exercises for them. But, from the statistics we have, first-time voters are in the range of 18 to 24 years old, because there was a time the commission automatically registered youths who turned 18 but this stopped in May 2017. There are 11,092 eligible first-time voters, but we have registered 7,429, which represents 67 percent of first-time voters,” Ms Bilal urged, asserting the importance of registering early and not during election year so as not to place undue pressure on the office’s resources.

Laura Pillay