Participate in cleaning voters register

I will start with a quote by Abraham Lincoln: “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

It all started with the launch of the roadmap for the 2021 general elections. But few people paid attention as the Electoral Commission (EC) rolled out to demarcate and reorganise polling stations, where some were shifted and renamed because of development and others was due to long distances. This activity ended and many Ugandans didn’t participate. Then on election day, they will move here and there to look for their polling stations.

The EC has moved on to another activity of verification of voter’s register at the village level aimed at enabling members of the particular village to scrutinise their respective register and identify persons who are not eligible to be on the voters’ register for their village.

Electoral Commission chairperson Simon Byabakama once noted that the data used in the 2016 general elections, Uganda had more than 57,842 villages. However, he also revealed that there is an addition of 1,138 new villages that have been added onto the existing ones.
There are 60,800 villages that the commission worked with while conducting local council elections.

The rest of the newly created villages had no leadership and even of the 60,800, some still have issues and were not in position to have elections. However, this will not sway me from supporting the new strategy of utilising the current structure in participating in elections as key stakeholders.

I have reservation with how this will work in urban areas, for example Nsambya, which has a thousand people and the LCs have no idea who died and who left the estate. In that case, what will happen?
There are villages that are not certain about the legality of their status.

There are many questions, a few answers. But where we have organised villages, this method will work, especially in the rural areas. And it’s at this point that I will applaud all those who will respond to the call to attend village council meetings in a bid to clean up the village register.

The EC issued guidelines to allow persons who may have applied for registration by NIRA and desire to vote, to ascertain whether their names have been included on the National Voters Register, provide an opportunity for public scrutiny of the voters’ roll in each village in the district in order to identify particulars of persons who are ineligible from appearing on the register. Using the same strategy, the EC managed to delete more than 6,369 voters from the Hoima District voters register and 3,588 in Nebbi, who where identified as dead.

A ‘clean’ register, the theory goes, eliminates thousands of ‘ghost’ voters who sit unnoticed on manually compiled registers. It prevents over-voting and ballot-stuffing, two common rigging techniques. Ugandans should know that elections are quite expensive. The preparations for the elections in Uganda will cost the country $235 million (about Shs700 billion).

For the 2021 elections, whether you decide to stay out of the process, the EC will plan for you and will print for each person on the register a ballot paper.
Faridah Lule,
[email protected]