ELECAM targets 6 mln new voters

Elections Cameroon, ELECAM, has adopted strategies to register at least six million new voters when the ongoing registration campaign ends by August 31, 2016.

It is reported that there are 11 million potential voters in the country. Going by the statistics the Division in charge of Communication and Public Relations at ELECAM provided to The Post, recently, some 91,750 (56,224 men and 35,526 women) new voters have already been registered in the 10 Regions of Cameroon, since the annual revision of the electoral registers started on January 1.

Regarding classification, the Northwest Region was first with 15,437 new voters, followed by the West Region with 14,014 voters.

Others Regions came in the following order: Far North 13,296, Littoral 11,790, Centre 9,231, North 7,526, Southwest 6,340, Adamawa 5,615, East 4,698 and the South Region 3,803 voters.

Meanwhile, in a special campaign targeting young people of between 20 and 35 years in the month of February 2016 dubbed: “Operation 20,000 Youths to be Registered in 20 days,” ELECAM succeeded in largely going beyond that target as some 46,266 youths (28,215 males and 18,051 females), enrolled as new voters on the electoral registers across the country.

The West Region was first in that operation registering 9,211 youths, followed by the Far North with 7,122 voters. Other Regions followed thus: Northwest 5,437, Centre 5,282, Littoral 4 967, North 4,381, East 2 553, South 2,531, Adamawa 2,506 and Southwest 2,276.

In a justification of the ongoing campaign launched by the Director General of Elections, Abdoulaye Babalé, targeting women on the occasion of the International Women’s Day, ELECAM is taking the opportunity to stir the conscience of women on the role they could play in building a democratic society. It is observed that, despite the rising figure of women in all the domains, they are still poorly represented on the electoral lists.

It is against this backdrop that the elections management body is out this month to boost the number of women on the electoral registers; get them involved in the electoral process; sensitise and educate them on the voters’ registration process to (or “intending to”) reinforcing the credibility and reliability of Elections Cameroon.

In this regard, all ELECAM branches in the country are charged with the identification of associations and women’s networks for sensitisation and the elaboration of a plan on how to go down to the field to get women registered on the electoral registers.

The Post gathered that apart from using conventional mass media outlets, including; Facebook and Tweeter to alert and sensitise the women, public address systems built on mobile vans will also be used.

Meanwhile, in a recap, it was disclosed that 5,805,668 new voters (3,041,168 men and 2,764,500 women) were enrolled on the electoral registers in 2015 during the electoral lists revision exercises. In cleaning up the electoral registers in the course of the same year, some 1,939 cases of double registration were identified and scrapped from the list, while some 5,758 voters lost their electoral capacity.

Some 37,305 voters were declared dead while 67,804 voters witnessed diverse modifications. On the other hand, as at December 30, 2015, some 6,072,513 voter’s cards were printed. The cards were regionally distributed as follows: Far North 1,071,849; Centre 1,019,809; Littoral 799,185; West 652,314; North 632,047; Northwest 575,338; Adamawa 398,689; Southwest 364,919; East 307,650 and South 250,713.