July 29, 2009
List of the Problems That Have Consistently Plagued the Somaliland National Voter Registration Project.
1. The National Electoral Commission (NEC), and the political parties insisted on a sophisticated biometric (fingerprint identification) system, against the explicit advice of Interpeace and the donors; both recommended using a simpler manual system in order to avoid potential delays from an electronic one that Somalilanders would not be familiar with and that would require recruiting extra personnel and obtaining materials from abroad.
2. Donors provided about $10 million for the development and implementation of this ambitious system, of which over $ 5 million was directly contracted to Somaliland vendors and the employment of thousands of Somalilanders to implement the programme.
3. The Voter Registration system was seriously abused during its implementation, with widespread corruption and systematic fraud, resulting in the failure to record the fingerprints of more than half of all registrants. In other cases, over 150 registrations were made with a single fingerprint at the same registration centre, or through photographs instead of in person.
4. NEC refused to accept additional oversight support in the field or to implement proposed measures to curtail abuse of the registration system. These abuses are illegal and those responsible should be held to account but not a single case has been brought to court despite ample evidence.
5. In order to rescue the voter registration exercise, a second back-up facial recognition system (FRS) was introduced for which the system was not originally designed. This is an unprecedented and technically complex exercise, which was undertaken in order to rescue this unique opportunity for Somalilanders for both voter registration and a national identity card - as well as to protect the huge investment and effort incurred. All political parties agreed that the system must be saved and the complex FRS system was developed to do that.
6. The technical challenges in addressing the abuse of the voter registration system were aggravated after the 29 October 2008 attack in Hargeysa, which led to the withdrawal of the Indian IT company that was developing and supporting the implementation of the system.
7. New technical experts took their place and enormous efforts have been made to identify and eliminate the most flagrant violations, and to produce a Final Voter List that is credible and technically sound.
8. There is no National Registrar in post because the NEC and the parties have failed to reach agreement on this for the past 16 months. The acting National Registrar has been fully trained by Interpeace and intimately involved in the development of the Final Voter List.
But, as the acting official, he cannot build a team of qualified Somaliland technicians to run the Server and the Final Voter List process, which were the original intent and the commitment of NEC. Interpeace has serious concerns about management of the Server after the Voter List is produced in the absence of a National Registrar and trained staff to manage it.
