Number of registered voters rises


The number of registered voters for the 2019 elections has risen to 6 859 375 following a cleaning and inspection exercise of the voter’s register conducted by the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC).

At the end of the registration exercise the number of registered voters was 6 856 295 but yesterday MEC announced a new figure of 6 859 375 which means there is an overall rise of 3 080.

MEC chairperson Jane Ansah said data for some centres in Dedza was not retrieved and after the exercise, number of total registrants for the affected centres rose from 49 to 7 808.

“At the end of Phase 8 of voter registration, when all the kits were in the central warehouse, a second sweep was done on all the kits to ensure that all the data had indeed been collected from the kits,” said Ansah.

The body also found that some biometric kit operators were capturing registrants using the wrong centres and after correcting such variations in the database, number of registered voters increased in some districts and decreased in others.

According to Ansah, they removed 13, 244 multiple registrants; voters who registered twice had their name removed from the centre where they registered second.

Following the exercise, districts such as Mzimba, Chitipa, Karonga, Lilongwe, Zomba and Blantyre saw a decrease in registered voters.

However, the number of registrants in Salima increase from 170 427 to 171 929 and Mchinji from 241 490 to 241 923.

Figures for Mangochi ose from 402 163 to 402 719, Balaka from 155 754 to 156 127 while Mulanje now has 281 873 registered voters from 281 167.

“Today, be assured that of the 6.8 million voters registered by MEC, there are no double registrants because of the biometric system and that we have brought all the data in one central place,” said Ansah.

 

 

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