Mozambique: Only three quarters of Maputo potential voters register

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Mozambique: Only three quarters of Maputo potential voters register

7:55 CAT | 21 May 2018

O País / Ana Chemane

Only slightly more than three quarters of the potential electorate in Maputo city have bothered to register to vote in the municipal elections scheduled for 10 October.

Voter registration ran from 19 March to 17 May, but despite this two month period a large number of Maputo citizens left registration to the last moment. On Wednesday and Thursday, the last days for registration, huge queues built up at some of the city’s registration posts.

The busiest posts stayed open until after midnight on those days, so that they could register every potential voter in the queues.

At a press conference on Monday, the Chairperson of the Maputo City Elections Commission, Ana Chemane, said that 616,082 voters had registered out of the city’s target figure of 796,965 – thus only 77.3 per cent of the estimated potential electorate registered.

The target figure was provided by the National Statistics Institute (INE), which estimated the number of people over the voting age of 18 based on the population census held in August last year.

Within the city, the urban district with the worst registration was Kampfumo, in the heart of Maputo, where only 67.53 per cent of the potential electorate voted. Yet Kampfumo is the richest, most literate district in the country, and nobody in this district lives more than a few minutes walk from a registration post.

Chemane said that during the registration there had only been ten electoral offences – these included attempts to register more than once, forgery of identity documents, and physical assaults upon members of the registration brigades.

The electoral registers are now on display at all the registration posts, so that people who registered can check that their names are indeed on the register and have been entered correctly. The brigades are on hand to correct any mistakes.

Under the electoral law, the registers must be displayed for four days, starting from the second day after the end of registration. This period for public consultation of the registers began on Saturday and will end on Tuesday.

Source: AIM