Brussels, Belgium 25 July 2019 - On 30th June, the Togolese people voted for the municipal elections, the first to be held in the last 32 years. To compile reliable electoral rolls and ensure that polling was conducted properly, a registration process had been set up by the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), in collaboration with Belgian company Zetes.
This was the sixth time the CENI has worked with Zetes for a similar operation. The last time was in 2018, for the legislative elections. In fact, those electoral rolls were used as the basis for this registration campaign.
“This registration operation took place in three main phases”, explains Dish’ma Mwanza, Project Manager at Zetes. “First, we had to train the teams thanks to a team of supervisors and technicians. Their assignment was twofold. First, they had to train 220 instructors and ensure that the entire registration process took place without a hitch. These instructors explained, in turn, all the steps of the process to over 5000 operators”.
The actual registration process started on 16th May and finished on 20th May. During these four days, every Togolese person of voting age could register at their local registration centre with their identification documents so that their information was then compared to the 2018 file. After validation, prints and a photo were taken so that an official voter card could be issued. At the end of each day, the operators printed and posted the list of voters so that everyone could check its validity. In the event of a problem, anyone could raise an objection.
The third and last phase was to consolidate and check all the information recorded during the four days of voter registration. An Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) was used to compare the biometric data. Its aim is to produce a list of persons whose prints and/or photographs are deemed to be too similar. This list is then subject to arbitration by human experts. This adjudication process separates true multiple occurrences from false duplicates.
The result was that 3,423,099 voters were officially listed. This figure is the final total, after corrections and the elimination of the 43,426 duplicates identified.