Ramallah; The Central Elections Commission began today to implement the ‘Exhibition and Challenges’ phase of the electoral calendar in all population centers in which the upcoming local elections will be held on the 17th of July 2010.
The ‘Exhibition and Challenges’ phase is a key step in the electoral process in which each voter registration center exhibits the list of voters that had previously registered to vote in that center and who will be eligible to vote in the same center on election day.
The ‘Exhibition and Challenge’ process began on Sunday the 25th of April and will last for five days with the centers closing by end of working day on Thursday the 29th of April. During this period any member of the public has the right to visit the center in which he or she had registered in order to check that their personal information on the Voters’ List is accurate, to submit an application for amendments to their record if there are any mistakes and/or to submit challenges to other names appearing on the list on the basis of eligibility to vote.
The aim of the ‘Exhibition and Challenges’ phase is to ensure that the CEC ends up with the most accurate Voters’ List possible in preparation for the upcoming local elections. The CEC, therefore, calls on all citizens registered on the Voters’ List to visit the centers in which they had registered in previous voter registration drives, including those conducted in 2005, 2006 and 2007, to check the accuracy of their records and to ensure that they are registered at a center that is in the local council in which they reside.
The CEC’s preparations for this electoral phase included opening 628 ‘Exhibition and Challenges’ centers distributed over 303 local councils in the West Bank. These centers are staffed by a total of 1,400 employees who had previously received extensive training on this phase and who have now begun to receive and process applications for amendments or challenges to the Voters’ List.
The CEC had hoped to also conduct local elections in the Gaza Strip but regretfully had to send a letter to the Palestinian Ministers Council last week in which it explained its inability to hold local elections in Gaza as it was not able to register new eligible voters there during the last voter registration drive which the CEC concluded on the 16th of March 2010.
The number of eligible voters currently on the Voters’ List stands at approximately 1,520,000 of which one million voters are registered in the West Bank representing around 82% of West Bank eligible voters according to the population projections of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics up to the middle of the year 2010.