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| Pic: An example of the BVR Kits utilized by National Registration Bureau that MEC has adapted for the Biometric Voter Registration exercise |
As Malawi prepares for the 2019 Tripartite Elections, the
Malawi Electoral Commission MEC says is it is expecting to register more than 9
million eligible voters during the upcoming digital Voter Registration
exercise as compared to the 2013 voter registration exercise where
MEC registered 7.5 million voters
through the previous, manual, voter registration system.
This year’s voter registration exercise will utilize a
Biometric Voter Registration Kit which
will instantly register voters by scanning data from the newly introduced National ID
to produce a voter registration
certificate in less than half a minute.
The BVR is reported to be significantly faster and more
efficient as compared to the
time-consuming Optical Mark
Recognition (OMR) system of collecting voter
data on paper then scanning the data onto a computer which saw
people queuing for hours waiting for a
turn to be registered as voters in 2013.
Speaking during a
demonstration of the Biometric Voter Registration process at Riverside Hotel in
Lilongwe at the recent training of newly recruited MEC stringers, MEC’s Deputy Director of ICT Ebony
Msikawanthu explained that the digital
innovation in the voter registration process
is expected to reduce queues at voter registration centers as MEC officials will
now be able to register hundreds of people in a single day at each registration centre.
According to Msikawanthu, the BVR is also expected to eradicate some anomalies
such as such as misspelled names and wrong voter photographs that were
prevalent in the last voter registration exercise.
Meanwhile, the Electoral Body is currently conducting civic
education awareness exercises to sensitize Malawians on its first ever
digitized voter registration process.
According to MEC, the first phase of the Biometric Voter
Registration exercise runs from 25th May
2018 to June 7, 2018 covering; Mchinji District, Dowa District, Kasungu
District, Kasungu Municipality, Nkhotakota
and Ntchisi District.
