The Malawi Electoral Commission says despite the recently procured Election management devices (EMDs) having capacity to transmit results, it will still stick to manual procedures.
MEC Commissioner Richard Chapweteka disclosed this on Friday when it received the last consignment of EMD’s comprising a total of 720 as it gets set to start registration of voters from September this year.
Additionally, 650 power banks are expected to be in next week by road from South Africa and will be received at the Dedza border by MEC and all the relevant stakeholders.
The electoral body is migrating from Biometric voter registration kits (BVRK’s) to EMDs, as the former were procured around 2016 and with technological improvements, they are becoming obsolete.
Chapweteka explained that the BVRKs were heavy to carry while EMDs are hand held devices and easy to carry especially in hard to reach areas without any challenge.
The gadgets will be used for registration, verification and transferring of voters and further have capacity for results management.
However despite the devices having capacity to do transmission of results, the Commission has opted to use manual methods in election management due to trust issues which arise during polls.
“We find it difficult to do that for the time being, maybe in future but for the time being because I don’t think Malawians are ready to accept that. So we don’t want to go into issues of trust, questioning each other that probably you’re trying to manipulate figures through the electronic transmission so that’s all we’re trying to do now.
“But maybe in future when probably the public understands that we cannot continue doing manual transmission; maybe then we’ll be able to, because we already have the capacity to do that but for now we’ll just do manual transmission.”
MEC will undertake demonstrations to test the equipment before commencing registration in September this year.
UTM’s Regional Director of elections Alexander Lungu said as a party they are happy with how things are progressing
“Our expectation is very high that the General election I think will be okay”
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