MEC, Police investigating double voter registration

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Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) and Police in Mzuzu are investigating reports of cases of attempted double registration and attempts to register for relatives at various registration centres  in the city.

On Thursday, a Registration Supervisor at Zolozolo FP School, Mary Chawinga, explained that MEC officials stopped a woman from registering with her newly collected national ID after she had already registered with her national ID slip in Karonga.

A woman registering to vote at Mzuzu RTC Centre

The woman’s second voter registration certificate has since been confiscated and the issue has been escalated for further investigations.

And in a satirical twist of events,  a Registration Supervisor at Mzuzu RTC Centre, Yesaya Soko,  narrated how MEC  officials  had to  civic educate some concerned wives of serving Army officers  who  were  served with the heart-breaking news that  wives  are not allowed to register for husbands.

“Also we have got some hiccups in that some soldiers  have gone to DRC [for peace keeping missions] so their wives  want to register for voting,  so we said no,  each one has to register for himself but otherwise everything is going on smoothly,” Soko said.

Soko also reported that a lack of NRB registration forms temporarily delayed the voter registration at the Centre as most of the people wishing to register were soldiers from Moyale Baracks who had previously missed the national ID registration while in training.

In the just-ended voter registration exercise, MEC was for the first time registering eligible voters by scanning the national ID through the BVR Kit to produce a voter registration slip. The BVR Kit is built with facilities to detect double registration and underage voter registration.

According to MEC, registered voters are expected to use only the voter registration certificate for voting in the May 21, 2019 Tripartite Elections.

Meanwhile, MEC is expecting to register 9 million eligible voters in the entire 2018 voter registration exercise.  So far 6,264, 183 have already registered in phase one to seven representing 81 % of the predicted   7,745, 095 for the first seven phases.

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One Comment

  1. So this means Madam Justice Jane Smash (MEC chairperson) was lying to Malawians about MEC system that their equipments are cleaned of data after every phase. This means their data is very much live and connected to every MEC equipment. The computers which are missing have an access to MEC savers. Our 2019 elections are not safe and can easily be tampered with through their savers which are using telephone/cellphone networks via internet. Malawi at 55…?????

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