The Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission (ABEC) has announced that it
plans to commerce a complete national re-registration for all eligible voters in
Antigua and Barbuda starting in October this year.
Supervisor of Elections, Ian Hughes, said the process will likely run for one month
in the first instance with a period for claims and objections taking place sometime
afterwards.
“ABEC is of the considered opinion that the process of re-registration is the best
method of maintaining the integrity of the Voter’s List. It is important to
emphasize that ALL eligible persons (18 years and over) will be required to re-
register when the process officially begins.
Persons whose cards will expire prior to the re-registration exercise, are kindly
asked to keep them secure and to use alternative forms of national identification for
business purposes,” ABEC announced in a statement.
Hughes noted that the process will cost approximately $5 million noting that Prime
Minister Gaston Browne, under whose portfolio elections fall, has indicated that he
will make available the funding to conduct the exercise.
He revealed that ABEC will work along with CBN of Canada which supplied the
cards and other systems needed to carry out the exercise. “We are going to issue
new cards with new security features, new systems as our computers have been
around for the past ten years and need to be replaced; that means both hardware
and software needing to be replaced,” he noted.
Additionally, Hughes anticipates that ABEC will need to hire temporary workers
to assist it with the re-registration exercise. That will also necessitate arranging
training sessions for the temporary workers. He added that the human resource
requirements to conduct the training is currently available at ABEC.
There are just over 60 thousand registered voters on the official register of
elections for Antigua and Barbuda.
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