THE STATE OF THE VOTERS REGISTRATION

STATE OF THE VOTERS REGISTRATION

Less than two months to the elections, no one can say with certainty how many Cameroonians are effectively registered. We have noted with disappointment the careful and systematic exclusion of the civil society in the registration process by carefully frustrating any efforts by the civil society to promote and monitor voters’ registration. The list inherited by ELECAM from MINATD which they openly admitted has many inconsistencies and needed to be cleaned has not been cleaned many months after inheritance and few weeks before the elections. The software being used in the process remains a mystery to many political actors, the civil society and the syndicates as no one has been granted official access and assessment of the system. The president of ELECAM  is in record for publicly stating that there may be no way to fully eliminate double registrations in the list. While ELECAM refused total recompilation of the list on grounds that there was limited means and time, President Fonkam has been again in record saying they hope to reach 9 million voters registration by the end of August even making shameful reference to Nigeria where over 73 million voters were registered in less than two months in the electoral list.  It must be noted that all figures given by ELECAM are based on figures from the unclean list plus new registrations which in many cases are still individuals likely to be in the old list.  Understandably, there is double counting in the figures being made public by ELECAM.  Mindful of these contradicting and confusing statements and statistics, the civil society and syndicates call on ELECAM to come clean and do good to grant unrestricted access to information relating to the electoral process.