President summons MEC over voters’ roll mess

The May 20 Tripartite Elections voters’ roll is in a mess, with an average of 300 registered voters per verified polling centre missing or having wrong details, Nation on Sunday can reveal.

According to Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) sources, the body admitted these problems when President Joyce Banda—apparently concerned about the deepening voters’ roll crisis—on Thursday night summoned MEC commissioners and their top executives to explain the cause of the crisis and its effects on the electoral calendar.

Both MEC spokesperson Sangwani Mwafulirwa and President Banda’s special adviser on communication and political affairs Elias Wakuda Kamanga confirmed the meeting in separate interviews.

Kamanga, however, said he did not have details of what transpired at the meeting that followed the commission’s suspension of the voters’ roll verification exercise on March 25 2014 after discovering irregularities in the personal details of registered voters.

Malawians were expected to confirm personal information such as names and pictures in the voters’ roll verification exercise from March 24 to 28 2014 ahead of the May 20 polls for which 7.5 million people have registered to vote.

Explaining the suspension last week, chief elections officer Willie Kalonga said the commission deferred the exercise due to logistical challenges and inadequacies in the preliminary voters’ roll.

In an e-mail response yesterday, Mwafulirwa confirmed that MEC chairperson Maxon Mbendera led a team from the commission to brief the President on the problem.

Mwafulirwa, however, said the glitch—which he said emanated from the body’s Information Technology (IT) Department—has since been rectified.

“We have rectified the problem and the printing is going on smoothly,” he said.

Mwafulirwa said there were discrepancies in some centres where the total on the voters’ roll was below what was recorded during registration and others where the figures exceeded the information on record.

“There were also some centres where the total on the voters’ roll and the actual registered tallied. No analysis has been done to establish the actual rate of variation. The inspection exercise was abandoned and we are concentrating on rectifying the challenges,” he said.

Mwafulirwa, however, declined to indicate when the verification exercise will resume.

“Without committing dates, the nation should be assured that soon the commission will announce the dates when the exercise will recommence. Although some days have been lost and that the actual period of inspection of the voters’ roll has been prolonged, the electoral calendar is intact and the date of polling will not be affected,” he said.

Mwafulirwa said MEC is already rectifying the problems that were noticed and is making good progress.

“We have put in place quality control measures whereby teams have been assigned to physically check each of all the registers being produced to ensure that they are of acceptable standard and do not contain the flaws that were experienced before,” he said.

But verification monitoring reports from three districts—Karonga, Dowa and Chitipa by the National Initiative for Civic Education (Nice) Trust—that we have seen show that the problems are deep.

Nice reports that in Karonga—where verification started on March 24—most centres had a lot of missing voters on the roll.

Narrates the Karonga Nice report: “One extreme case [was] Tumbi Centre, which is in Karonga Central Constituency. It registered 343 voters, but the centre was supplied with a voters’ roll with 10 people only and the 10 people on the voters’ roll do not belong to the community surrounding Tumbi School. They belonged to other centres. Whether they are centres within Karonga or without, it is not established.

“At Maghemo Secondary School, a lot of people did not appear in the voters’ roll. [The same was the case at Mwenelondo]. One of the victims for Mwenelondo Centre is a Nice [worker] Chancy Kayira who, after discovering that he did not appear on the voters’ roll, got re-registered.”

In Dowa, the problems included several registered voters missing on the voters’ roll; duplication of names on the roll; voters’ photos on the roll without names; “strange names appearing on voters’ roll” and “very dark pictures in some centres.”

At Mponela 1 School in Dowa Central Constituency, 1 284 voters were missing in the records out of the 6 124 that were registered, according to the Nice district report.

It was the other way round at Mtanila School in Dowa Ngala Constituency where there were 148 more ‘voters’ than the 5 211 registered.

Chitipa also faced similar problems, with several people missing on the voters’ roll.

On what redoing the verification would mean on the elections budget, Mwafulirwa said MEC was assessing the expenditure on the suspended exercise and how much has been salvaged.

Government gave MEC K400 million for its operations, of which voter verification was one of the activities to be carried out.

“We have put in place measures to minimise costs. We are also drawing a budget for the next exercise. When we establish the shortfall, the commission will come up with means for sourcing the funds. One way could be cutting from other budget lines,” he said.