Cote d'Ivoire says close to 900,000 new voters well identified

A total of 877,245 people were positively identified in the identification operation of the population after crosschecking with electoral registers, Cote d'Ivoire's electoral commission announced on Thursday.

The newly unveiled result marked a step forward to the scheduled presidential elections on Nov. 29, which is highly anticipated by the international community to bring the West African country out of the crisis since the 2002 attempted coup d'etat.

"Out of a total of 1,911,230 people who had not been identified, 877,245 were identified by the technical operators," the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI) said in a statement.

Out of the 6.3 million applicants who were registered during the preparation of the electoral list, about 2.7 million did not appear neither in the 2000 electoral list, nor in any other historical registration after the first round of data analysis.

The discovery of these people "without status" triggered political controversy about possible fraud, forcing the government to adopt "other complementary modalities of crosschecking", so that they could find all the voters for the elections.

According to the CEI statement, "there are only 1,033,985 people remaining without any status."

The investigation of these cases led to a delay in the publication of the provisional poll list, which was due in August, with many in fear of another postponement of the elections since 2005.

Source: Xinhua