Elections Commission processes 20,000 forms, as thousands queue to re-register

65,000 people re-registered to vote ahead of the September 7 election, which was annulled last week by the Supreme Court. With little over a week remaining before the rescheduled October 19 vote, the court at midnight on October 10 ordered the EC to collect voter fingerprints and restart the entire re-registration process from scratch.

The announcement of a 24 hour deadline for registration saw hundreds of volunteers in political party outposts working right through the night of October 11 in an effort to re-register thousands of voters. The largest party, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) which obtained 45.45 percent of the popular vote in the annulled first round, said it had re-registered more than 33,000 people.

A system crash around 2:30pm Sunday afternoon due to the large volume of data saw the EC begin manually entering data to continue processing while the system was restarted. An official told Minivan News the problem was fixed two hours later at 4:30pm, however some people reportedly became upset as the manual process meant they were unable to be immediately issued with a confirmation slip. 2500 tickets remained at the time of the crash, the official noted.