About 54,000 people transfer to vote
By IAN MCDONALD
A TOTAL of 54,000 people have been recorded as transfer during the recent bio metric registration.
Solomon Islands Electoral Commission (SIEC) Chief Electoral Officer Mose Saitala said when confirming this on Wednesday said it is an unpredictable one for the Commission.
“This is a very unprecedented as we never have this before that we have so many registrations by way of transfers which recorded around 50,000 as we have now,” he said.
He said the increase of numbers has already created a problem for SIEC in terms of managing the issue.
He said over the past weeks SIEC has to beef up the number of data officers to be able to go through the registration which means by every form B that were filled has to be checked against the data that was entered during the registration to be able to verify,” he said.
“By way of the Bio Metric system, it’s an automatic in the sense that when officers start putting in information in the data, the matching exercise start to indicate automatically. However you change your name or constituency, the biometric picks you up instantly,” he added.
“With the 50,000 transfers the system also records around 60,000 duplicates meaning they register so many times,” he added.
Mr Saitala said from that duplicates, some have registered twice, triple, four times, five, six, seven, and eight but the highest record one has registered 10 times,” he said.
He said for those who have registered so many times, the last one will be the final according to the SIEC policy.
“This is almost like a police case now because there’s almost like attempted to decode the system with no respect for the law of the country, so we are really will go after people who attempt to do those things,” he said.
He said despite the system has picked a total of 372,906 registrants after the cleaning up of the registration; they expect a high number of reductions as a result of the 54,000 transfers.
