Swapo co-ordinator bashes ECN

Swapo Party co-ordinator for Omusati Region, Erginus Endjala, has slammed the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) for serious shortcomings in the voting process. Speaking to Namibian Sun, Endjala said while they were certain that Swapo would win the elections by an overwhelming majority, the plan had been to give Swapo 100% of the vote in the Omusati Region. According to Endjala, Swapo has received 111 829 of the votes in the National Assembly election in the Omusati Region, which has 139 760 registered voters. “Although our presidential candidate received the highest votes with 114 917, the margin is big and we cannot be satisfied if some Namibians were left without practising their democratic right due to oversight,” said Endjala. Endjala said the first problem that the ECN made was to completely trust the manufacturers of the electronic voting machines (EVMs). “The verification machines were a problem. The marketing strategy was that these machines have a capacity to register 60 voters in 10 minutes. That was the rationale that got us all excited. To my surprise, I waited four minutes for verification,” said Endjala. The second problem, said Endjala, was that voter education was conducted only by the ECN and not the political parties. “The mock ballot paper was only given to us three days before elections. When were we going to educate our voters?” Endjala asked. Endjala further said there should have been a Plan B in place by having at least five EVMs at a single polling station so that voting could continue when one EVM acted up. “Our total registered voters were 139 760 and we had a total of 176 polling stations in the entire Omusati Region. It tells you that at every polling station there would be a minimum 794 people. Each machine could only take about 500 people. I don’t understand why no one thought of this. “It is either that ECN lacks financial resources, or they lack the ability and the capacity to deliver or ultimately they are incompetent.” Endjala suggested that a complete overhaul was necessary for a smoother election process in the future. “The ECN had months to plan and they were not able to deliver. This to me is very wrong. Going further, there should be a complete overhaul.” OSHAKATI MERJA IILEKA