Senior SPLM official urged NEC to allow the media to visit registration centers to inform people about voter registration

Untitled report by Sudan Radio Service, November 23, 2009:

(Khartoum) - The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement visited voter registration centers in Khartoum on Saturday and Sunday to assess the registration process in Khartoum state.

SPLM Ministers and State Ministers in the Government of National Unity, the Khartoum State Government and the National Legislatures went to visit 7 areas within Khartoum state where there are about fifty voter registration centers.

Speaking to Sudan Radio Service after their visit, a senior SPLM official, the deputy-governor of Khartoum state, Parmena Awerial Aluong, explains the purpose of the visit.

[Parmena Awerial Aluong]: “We visited sixteen centres and there were some problems in these areas. We tried to resolve some of them, not all of them but I felt that the visit was very, very important to us. One of the things I saw was that all the political parties were all represented in the centers [as election observers] and that makes the registration really different from other elections I have seen.”

Awerial urged the National Elections Commission to allow the media to visit the registration centers to inform people about voter registration.

Chief registrars in the different centers say they are forbidden by the NEC to give statements to the media.

Meanwhile, the secretary-general of the SPLM Parliamentary caucus in the National Assembly, Thomas Wani Kundu, says numerous violations were reported to the SPLM by the observers at the different centers in Khartoum.

[Thomas Wani]: “One, the NCP has a policy of deceiving people who come for registration. They are given fake forms which they fill in thinking that they have registered. And then of course people come innocently and began registering without knowing that they were not at a real registration center. Secondly, when the people go in they are called to back so that their numbers are written down and their telephone numbers are taken. The idea behind this is that those people can be bribed so that they will vote for the NCP. Despite the fact that we have got representation from the different political parties, the NCP was predominant in all these centers.”

Thomas Wani has urged southern Sudanese to turn out in big numbers to register in order to be ready to vote during the forthcoming general elections and also to prove “that the results of the recent census were falsified”.