Liberia: Voters Roll Exhibition Begins Today
Davidetta Brown Lansanah, Chairperson of the National Elections Commission
— NEC announces
The National Elections Commission (NEC) will today begin the 2023 voter roll exhibition across the country.
The objective of the exhibition process, as the Commission recently announced, is to allow registered voters to verify their information as per what they have given to the NEC staff conducting the biometric voter registration.
The Commission has announced that the exhibition of the provisional registration roll will commence on June 12-17 across the country.
According to the electoral body, it is vital that the general public bring forward all concerns during the exhibition exercise, saying the roll is being made available for verification, inclusion, and objection.
For verification, NEC wishes that all details, including the correct spelling of registered voters’ names, actual ages, and other important details, are well done and in place.
For inclusion, eligible voters whose names are being omitted due to technical challenges or whatever, provided their information is accurate and sufficiently proven, will have the opportunity to be included in the voter roll.
As for objection, a critical part of the process, anyone who has registered but is not qualified to vote in Liberia in general or a particular locality will be removed from the list provided there is sufficient proof that he or she is unqualified to be considered a registrant to vote in the said locality or the country at large.
According to the NEC, people who are not Liberians and are ineligible to vote in Liberia will be removed from the voters’ roll.
NEC, although it used biometric technology for the first time to register voters, said it has left room for challenges the system might have encountered that might possibly pose a challenge to having a fraud-less final voter roll in the end.
As a means of pacifying the situation, the Commission employed the deduplication mechanism, which, it believes, relieves it of including names that should not be on the final voter roll. There were multiple challenges, including a shortage of cards to print voter cards, low or slow performance of the system, and a lack of sufficient knowledge on the part of some, if not many, of the staffers the Commission hired to work.
Prior to the introduction of the biometric system, the Commission, over the years used the Optical Manual Roll (OMR), a system that never fell short of irregularities, including multiple and double registrations, among others.
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With the introduction of the biometric system, some technology experts argued that there was no need for the Commission to worry about multiple registrations or other irregularities if only the truest sense of biometrics were applied.
“The Commission recently released its preliminary results in which they disclosed that people succeeded in doing double registration and there were even underage or minors who registered to vote. It is unfortunate. Where biometrics are used in their truest sense, no one succeeds in registering more than once. This is while the fingerprinting is done. Even if you change your name, your information appears in the real biometric system, and you get caught, but this is our NEC’s own thing, and it's just so funny,” an IT expert who preferred anonymity told the Daily Observer.
According to the source, while it is true that people maneuver to beat systems, systems must always be ahead of the game of fraud.
The source noted further that some of the pictures displayed with images of very young boys bearing voter ID cards show that NEC failed in its “on-sight” function. “Some registrants were actually babies, but the NEC staff registered them. Imagine how many of them we do not know about today. It is sad,” the source noted, concluding that the BVR should not be taken as law or gospel because no matter what the Commission does, there will still be people who have no right to vote but will vote because they have obtained voter cards.
NEC Chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah has admonished all registered voters to return to the locations where they registered to ensure that the details provided to the NEC staff while registering to vote are accurate.