Fix challenges in voter verification exercise

Verification of the national voters’ register and identification of persons with disability ahead of the 2021 General Election, which began on Monday, has gotten off to a disturbingly very low turnout in many parts of the country.

A survey conducted by this newspaper revealed that the exercise aimed at weeding out ghost voters from the register and stop cases of multiple-voting was not going on as planned.

The village council offices where it was meant to be conducted were either closed or inactive.
One of the issues that has emerged is that there has been very little publicity around this exercise. In Masaka Municipality, for example, people came out to reveal that it was only because of our survey that they had learnt of the exercise. That was construed as the Electoral Commission (EC) disenfranchising sections of the electorate.

This points to inadequate publicity and a failure of the civic education exercise. The EC has abdicated its rightful role and left it in the hands of civil society organisations such as Citizens’ Coalition for Electoral Democracy in Uganda (CCEDU). That is not right. Civil society is only meant to supplement the work of the EC. It is not meant to be the other way round.

The EC needs to take charge of the publicity and voter education as soon as yesterday. The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) makes it incumbent upon radio stations to make available airtime for purposes of relaying information on government programmes.

Most FM stations reveal that whereas they are ready to comply with the directive, the airtime is in most cases not utilised. The EC needs to take advantage of this. It should deploy its registrars in the various districts to make use of those lots to popularise the exercise.
At the same time, there is need for the country to once again see vibrant voter education programmes.

In some areas it was discovered that verification officers who are meant to convene meetings through area local council chairpersons were going about the meetings hastily and moving on to other areas. Why the hurry? Is it about lack of manpower or inadequate funding? Whatever the reason, the EC needs to fix it as it will negatively impact the exercise.

The need to have a clean register cannot be over emphasized. The cleanliness of a register says a lot about how credible an election turns out to be. That is why the EC should move now to fix some of the challenges that the verification exercise is facing.

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