Afghan voter registration exceeds 10 million mark

The number of Afghans registered to vote in the upcoming poll on 9 October has passed the 10 million mark. As of 21 August, over 10.35 million eligible Afghans have registered, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Of that total, 58.6 percent are men and 41.4 percent are women. "These numbers are not final as data continues to come in and be verified at the data centre in Kabul before it is entered into the database," Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a spokesman for UNAMA, told IRIN on Monday. "This process will continue for at least a couple of weeks." Voter registration sites closed on 15 August, but some sites remained open for five days more because the number of voters registered was lower than the national average in some parts of the country. At the request of the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) - the joint government/UN body overseeing the election - exceptions had been made for 42 districts in seven provinces in the south and southeast to address the question of under-registration in those areas, the UN official said. "This was primarily as a result of security that did not allow these registration sites to be opened earlier and therefore to allow them to stay open longer." Thus the JEMB had made an exception and the registration sites in those districts remained open for five more days until 20 August, he said, noting that was when voter registration actually closed throughout the country. Registrations are likely to resume after the presidential election on 9 October in a bid to boost voter numbers for the national and local parliamentary polls scheduled for April 2005, according to the JEMB.