Chester Sam­bra­no

News­gath­er­ing Ed­i­tor

chester.sam­bra­no@guardian.co.tt

The Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) has con­firmed that 1,154,708 peo­ple are cur­rent­ly el­i­gi­ble to vote in the up­com­ing gen­er­al elec­tion.

EBC chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Fern Nar­cis-Scope told Guardian Me­dia that prepa­ra­tions were well un­der­way for the April 28 polls.

“We are cur­rent­ly en­gaged in a num­ber of ac­tiv­i­ties, as we have been prepar­ing for an elec­tion year. The na­tion and every­one would have an­tic­i­pat­ed this. Lead­ing up to this an­nounce­ment, we had al­ready be­gun sev­er­al key prepa­ra­tions,” Nar­cis-Scope said.

She not­ed that re­cruit­ment for polling staff had start­ed, with ad­ver­tise­ments for train­ers and oth­er elec­tion per­son­nel cir­cu­lat­ing since last week.

“We now need to ac­cel­er­ate some of our planned ac­tiv­i­ties, but this is not un­fa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry for us. It’s sim­ply a mat­ter of ex­pe­dit­ing cer­tain process­es. We are all sys­tems go for the elec­tion on April 28,” she added.

Elec­toral reg­is­tra­tion is set to be­gin to­mor­row, af­ter which the EBC will pro­duce a re­vised list of elec­tors. This up­dat­ed list will be used to is­sue poll cards.

“There is still time be­fore the list is fi­nalised and poll cards are dis­trib­uted,” Nar­cis-Scope ex­plained.

The pre­lim­i­nary list of elec­tors, which cur­rent­ly stands at just over 1,154,708 peo­ple, will be pub­lished first.

“That num­ber will be re­vised once the elec­toral reg­is­tra­tion process is com­plete, and it is the re­vised list that will be used for the elec­tion,” she said.

The fi­nal list of can­di­dates con­test­ing the elec­tion will on­ly be known af­ter Nom­i­na­tion Day on April 4.

At this time, the EBC es­ti­mates that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,130 polling sta­tions will be in op­er­a­tion, though that num­ber may be ad­just­ed fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of elec­toral reg­is­tra­tion.

Nar­cis-Scope al­so re­mind­ed vot­ers who have changed their res­i­dence to up­date their reg­is­tra­tion with­in the next nine days.

“The pub­lic will see ad­ver­tise­ments urg­ing them to up­date their reg­is­tra­tion if they need to make changes. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, any­one who qual­i­fies to vote but has not yet reg­is­tered should take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to do so with­in their re­spec­tive con­stituen­cy,” she ad­vised.