With less than two weeks to go to the May 15 Ethiopian parliamentary polls, at least 27 000 voters have to be re-registered after irregularities were found, which included 10-year-old children being registered to vote. In some areas, however, eligible voters were not even registered to take part in the election. The chairperson of the national elections board, Kemal Bedri, announced this week that police were investigating and would prosecute those responsible for transgressions.
“We found that in one area it was very bad with underage voters. We decided that this could not have been done other than deliberately… We expect action to be taken.”
Re-registration will have to take place in 15 polling stations in Afar, in north-eastern Ethiopia, and in three polling stations in Sidama, in the south of the country. Each polling station has around 1 500 voters.
In March, election board officials discovered that children as young as three were registered to vote in Hadiya district, 200 km south of the capital Addis Ababa, where elections in 2000 had to be re-run because of similar problems. Traditionally, the district has opposed the ruling party.
In spite of evidence of irregularities, Kemal maintained a positive outlook: “The elections are going extremely well. I have yet to see campaigns without problems. The system is working as far as I am concerned.”
On Tuesday the High Court overturned election rules that had effectively banned thousands of local observers from monitoring the parliamentary polls.
High Court Judge Brehanu Teshome said the rules “contravened” the laws of the country.
Mekonnen Wondimu, a lawyer for the National Election Board, said the board would appeal the decision.
On April 5 the National Election Board introduced new rules requiring local groups to have registered as election observers when they were originally established, which meant almost all of the 35 groups that form the Organisation for Social Justice (OSJ) would have been unable to field observers. The OSJ went to court to challenge the rules on April 20.
“We have shown that such arbitrary decisions will not be tolerated by the public,” said Netsanet Demissie, director of the OSJ.
But with just more than a week to go before the vote, the OSJ says it has been unable to train and deploy its 3 000 monitors. Up to 319 election observers from the African Union, European Union, the United States (US), India, China, Turkey and the Arab League are also expected in the country.
Ethiopia last month expelled three US organisations — the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and the International Foundation for Election Systems — on charges that they were operating illegally in the country.
Opposition parties have accused the government of not providing a level playing field for the elections, in which the ruling coalition is expected to prevail over the small, fragmented and under-funded opposition.
The Ethiopian X
About 25,6-million of Ethiopia’s 71-million people have registered to vote.
Some 35 political parties will vie for seats in Ethiopia’s 547-seat lower house of Parliament, the Council of People’s Representatives. Voters will also elect representatives in nine regional state parliaments that will appoint members of the 112-seat Council of the Federation, Parliament’s upper house. Some 1 845 candidates — 271 of whom are women — will run for seats.
The elections will be Ethiopia’s third democratic vote. The previous two were won by the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which, together with affiliated parties, holds 519 of the seats in the federal Parliament.
Additional reporting by Irin News Service