Andrew Kathindi
Over 1.4 million Namibian voters are expected to cast their votes in the upcoming regional and local authority elections slated for the 25th of November, Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) has revealed.
This comes as the election body revealed that nearly 10,000 have been removed from the voting system. According to reports 1,643 of these are deceased voters, with duplicates of 7,895 voters removed through the Automatic Fingerprint identification System (AFIS) or manual litigations.
“A total of 69,676 new voters were registered during the SRV process. There are 95,066 voters were existing voters who received new voter cards due to change of address or replacement of lost cards, bringing the total number of registered voters for all 121 Constituencies to 1,408 670,” the ECN revealed.
This is nearly one million more registered voters than those that were registered to vote in the 2015 regional and local authority elections, where only 412,720 people were registered to vote countrywide, with 164,201 casting votes in those elections.
“Even though we have 1.4 million registered to vote, when it comes regional and local authority elections, usually, the total number of people that come to vote ends up to be around the 400,000 figure for this election. In the past years, the voters turn out is very low when it comes to the general council and local authority elections,” ECN spokesperson Lina Ndengu said.
Khomas region picked up the highest number of registered voters with 264,905 and Ohangwena region followed with 150, 724 followed by Omusati with a total of 148,834 voters in the region.
Samora Machel in the Khomas region is the constituency with the highest number of registered voters in the country with 45,962.
The ECN has also revealed that five constituencies will go uncontested because only one candidate was nominated for each of the constituencies. These are Nkurenkuru, Tondoro, Mankupi and Kapako in Kavango West region and Uuvudhiya in the Oshana region.
Chief Electoral Officer of the ECN, Theo Mujoro revealed that the printing of the ballot papers, the tender for which was awarded to South African company, Uniprint, has commenced.
“On Saturday, 07 November 2020 representatives of political parties, associations and independent candidates successfully completed the process of verifying and signing off of sample ballot papers for the forthcoming elections. The printing of ballot papers has thus commenced and progressing well,” said Mujoro.
