Gambians to vote with paper balloting in 2021 presidential election

Banjul, Gambia (PANA) - The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) Wednesday confirmed its readiness to use balloting paper in the forthcoming presidential election in 2021, an official source said here.

Speaking at a two-day validation summit on electoral draft Bill here, the chairman of the IEC, Alieu Momarr Njie, said: “At the level of the Independent Electoral Commission we want a fair play, integrity and transparency election.”

“In order to have a transparent election, certain things need to be included in the process so that both the winner and the loser will be satisfied after the election,” he added.

He, therefore, said his office would “make sure that from beginning to the end is transparent so that when you come to register your party, we have a criterion that will ensure the party’s satisfaction”.

Njie added that during the voter registration, they would make sure the whole country aware that registration was going on. This they plan to do in the first week of January 2021.

He said all the political parties would be informed any time soon when the registrations would take place, so that people would be there to register and parties would be allowed to send their agents to verify.

Additionally, the names of those registered in that particular place will be pasted and this will be done countrywide.

He added that IEC would wait for 30 days after the voting before compilation so that if there was any objection from any part, they would register it and deal with those objections.

-0-    PANA    MSS/RA   23Sept2020