Mozambique Elections: Opening hours for voter registration extended – Lusa

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Mozambique Elections: Opening hours for voter registration extended – Lusa

2:42 CAT | 19 May 2023

FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Conselho Cristão de Moçambique]

Mozambique’s National Elections Commission (CNE) has decided to extend the registration hours for the 11 October local elections by two hours due to voter registration queues, the commission announced on Friday.

“Taking into account the floods at many voter registration posts and the time that remains for the end of the period of the process” with two weeks to go, “CNE has instructed the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration [STAE] to extend, with immediate effect, the operation of the registration brigades to two more hours,” said Paulo Cuinica, spokesman for CNE.

With this measure, the registration posts will now open at 07:00 and close at 17:00, whereas before, they were open from 08:00 to 16:00.

Cuinica told a press conference that the CNE had also decided to strengthen the resources and staff working on voter registration in the provinces “most critical” in terms of flooding, namely in Sofala, Zambezia, Nampula, Niassa and Tete.

On the possibility of increasing the number of days of voter registration, as some civil society organisations are advocating, the CNE spokesman stressed that this option would mean an increase in financial resources in the context of budgetary constraints and also said that the number of voters already registered in the first 26 days of the operation was close to half of the target, which was around 10 million voters.

Since the start of the registration process, just over 4.7 million voters have been registered, corresponding to 47.40% of the entire number of voters expected in all 65 municipalities in the country, Paulo Cuinica said.

“We are making an extension [of the hours] possible, also taking into account the resources that the electoral bodies have,” he stressed.

The increase in the number of hours will allow “further accelerating the pace towards achieving better results from voter registration,” he continued.

Voter registration for the local elections ends on 3 June.

Source: Lusa