Voter list: 10% data inauthentic, says EWG
The Election Working Group (EWG) today revealed the findings of an independent survey and came up with various discrepancies in the existing voter list.
According to the survey, 90 percent of the data encrypted in the voter list was found to be authentic.
Some 3.4 percent voters had their names spelt wrong and 7.9 and 7.1 percent voters had flaws in the spelling of their husband or father’s name and their mother’s name respectively, it said.
Meanwhile, 5.4 percent voters had errors in their address, EWG Director Md Abdul Alim said at the briefing.
Conducting the survey in 2015-16 on 10,386 eligible voters, the watchdog, an alliance of 28 civil society organisations, revealed their findings at a press conference at Jatiya Press Club in Dhaka this afternoon.
The ratio of error was higher in terms of male voters with 56.5 percent in comparison to 43.5 percent for female.
Along with that, names of 3 percent dead people still appeared to be on the voter list, Alim said.
Some 3.31 percent people could not get enlisted on the voter list despite being eligible due to failure in submitting necessary documents or their absence during the upgradation of the list, he added.
The number of unregistered voters was the highest in Chittagong with 39.5 percent voters yet to be registered and Khulna was the second with 15.7 percent voters unregistered, Alim said quoting the survey.
Recommendations
The Election Working Group (EWG) also came up with some recommendations to authenticate the voter list:
-The Election Commission (EC) must ensure that the field level information collectors are physically present while gathering voter information.
-The voter registration process must be completely decentralised to ease the process of inclusion, omission and correction.
-The EC should appoint a neutral third party to conduct audit on the voter list each time after upgradation to purge errors.
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