Interview with IFES Project Manager in Georgia Silvana Puizina

After the launch of Central Election Commission’s web page, where the voter lists are displayed, many voters could not find themselves on the lists. Many people were even more surprised to find their deceased relatives on the lists. The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) provided Georgian authorities, particularly the Central Election Commission technical assistance to prepare for the elections, including development of the voter lists. Silvana Puizina, IFES project manager in Georgia talked to Civil Georgia on October 14 and explained the reasons of inaccuracies in the voter lists.

Q.: What is the assistance that the IFES provided to the Central Election Commission to compile the voter registry lists?

A.: The sort of assistance we’ve done is to facilitate the data entry and computerization of the voter data that has been collected by the Ministry of Interior Affairs and Ministry of Justice. The computerization process included providing some 130 computers for the data entry phase of the national data base , payment of staff and printing the preliminary and final voter lists.

All this process – collecting the data and data entry is a huge task. In most countries this would be a four-five year project. But we hope this process won’t stop with the parliamentary elections; that it will be a continuous process through to the presidential election [in 2005].

Apart from the voter lists, in partnership with UNDP and International IDEA, we’ve been working with the CEC on the training of the District and Precinct Election Commission staff.

The monitoring we will be doing during the elections will be a technical assessment of affects – what happened to the voter lists, has the training of the election commission members had impact, has the voter education had impact. We will probably have twenty or thirty teams on elections day in various places to look at how the system might be improved, how possible assistance might be improved that we give to the Central Election Commission. 

Q.: What are the main reasons that made the voter lists inaccurate? Thousands of eligible voters are not on the lists.

A.: Clearly, there are some problems with this data and some of these problems are because of the legal basis for compiling the voter lists. The legal basis here is that people are placed on a voter list where they are registered with the Ministry of Interior (registration place) which is not necessarily where they live.

It creates a problem. Because if you come from one of the regions and you’ve been living in Tbilisi (or vice versus), you have no legal right to be on the list in the new place of living unless you have changed your registration with Ministry of Interior to this new place.

This difference between where people are registered and where they live means it is very difficult to ever really validate the list. The list always will be vulnerable to criticism, because you have people not able to vote for where they may live. So that legal basis of registration is a problem in regard with compiling the voter lists.

It is not necessarily important to a civil registration process that you have  peoples’ addresses correct as usually the prime purpose is to provide proper identity documentation, while the voter lists requires you to have very accurate structured addresses.

This is a huge task to get right. There has to be a census of addresses that people live at which provides the base to work with. The focus has been to make this address base as good as possible for the parliamentary elections. And I am convinced it is still better than anything that existed before. Because people can check it, verify their information, and we continue to work with the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the CEC to improve the data. They are checking the duplicates with us and working very closely with us.

We know that there are problems with the Tbilisi voter lists. And we know that the Ministry of Interior Affairs has continued to work on that data and is to give updated information, we hope, in the next few days. Even if we can’t print and put these amended lists in the precincts, we’ll put the new data on the Central Election Commission’s web site, so that people can recheck the information. We know there are problems in the way the preliminary voter lists that have been displayed in the internet. And now we are working with the CEC to try to improve them. That is why the preliminary lists were published, to find out the inaccuracies and fix them.

The problem with the date of birth showing as 1/1/1800 is a kind of “mask” we did for those voters where we did not have date of birth because the data base requires the date to be filled in, that is why we use something really ridiculous, like 1/1/1800, actually it means that there is no date of birth available in the data we have from the Ministry of Interior Affairs. I know that this masking date caused some misunderstandings.

There are significant number of voters missing in Saburtalo and Vake [constituencies in the capital city Tbilisi]. The Interior Ministry informed us that there are about 30,000 voters missing in the lists in these two districts. I want to say once again that the reason for publishing the preliminary voter lists was to make inaccuracies obvious not on the elections day, but a month before the elections, and you can go and find what these problems are.

We know that deceased people and duplicates [when one person is on the lists more than once and often in different election precinct] will come off, because we deliberately did not remove deceased people because the districts and precincts will identify and confirm that we are removing the right person. We had the electronic copy of all the names of deceased people, but often the information that the Ministry of Justice has on deceased people is not sufficient to make a perfect match, thus you are risking removing someone that should be on the list.

We are also very careful about the duplicates, because we might know you are registered in two places, but we don’t know which is your latest and correct address, so on which precinct list you should be on. This is up to district election commissions to confirm and verify this information. So that final cleaning process will happen and it will continue to be very important that people go to the district election commissions and say “no I am not on the list. No I am not on for this address.”

Some opposition parties claim there are up to 600,000, or 650,000 additional voters on the lists, that will be used by the authorities to rig the ballot.

Another problem is a persistent discussion that there are about 600,000, or 650,000 more voters on the lists, but no concrete evidence of who these people are. I think it’s an unnecessary problem, because the simple statistics will tell you that the 2,6 million voters that we have on the lists are about right.

When someone says that there are 650,000 additional voters on the lists, I wonder how they have come up with this number and why everyone assumes it is right Because the 1,9 million voters [claimed by the New Rights – editor’s note] does not stand up to any statistical analysis. In most countries, generally the number of voters is two-thirds of the entire number of citizens of the country.

Even if you assume that Georgia’s population is as low as 4 million [according to the official statistics Georgia’s population is 4,4 million] you still have about 2,6 million voters in Georgia.

So, information being spread through the media and the voter lists still should be checked. Deceased people still have to coma off, duplicates still have to come off and there are lots of people that need to be added on the lists as a result of the publication of the preliminary lists. Verification is a normal process of the election system.

As an election administrator for some 22 years, in my own country, passionately believe that that the election administration people should be involved and responsible for all aspects of the election and that includes compiling voter lists. The election administration should have been working together with the Ministry of Interior to collect and verify the data on voters and on getting the address information right. I understand why it did not happened this way here, because the Ministry of Interior is the organization that holds the bulk of the civil registration data, but I think it would have made the process better if district staff had been working more closely with Ministry of Interior.

Q.: October 22 is a deadline for improving the voter lists. Do you think there is enough time to make the lists accurate?

A.: It is very undesirable to have new Central and District Election Commissions two months before the elections. This makes their work very difficult. They are so constantly under pressure. But I understand that it was necessary to change the election administrations for the credibility of the elections in the eyes of the public and parties. That was something that was demanded from the public.

Is there enough time to improve the situation before October 22? Maybe not to the standard of perfection that people want. But it is a beginning. This is a long-term project. This is a first step and this is as good, if not better than is possible in the time that was available. From January, I hope the serious cleaning and verification of the data we currently have will resume.

People should check themselves on the list. Even if they checked on the internet it is also good to go down to the district commission and check there. Because we provided every district with the whole list of everybody who is registered in the district, I strongly believe this is the best place to check.

Q.: Have you received information about the voters from the Autonomous Republic of Adjara?

A.: The data center, where all the data entry process is done, has not received information from Adjara. We don’t know if this information has gone to CEC, or what happened with that. We understand only from the newspapers that there was an announcement [of the authorities of Adjara – editor’s note] that the voter lists for Adjara were finished and there are about 280,000 voters in the Autonomous Republic.

It is up to the central government and the Central Election Commission to follow up with the data from Adjara. It’s up to the CEC to deal with the issue of why the information from Adjara was not added to the national computerized lists.

However, I have to say that we have started the training of district and precinct staff and the trainers in Adjara have been actively involved in the training process.

Q.: How would you evaluate overall situation in the country on the eve of the elections?

A.: I’d like to quote Zurab Chiaberashvili [of election observer NGO International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy] who said at a recent joint seminar that he is very optimistic about the November 2 parliamentary elections. The things that make me positive are that there are very positive responses from the CEC. They try to address those problems that are highlighted. Unfortunately the short time is a problem they cannot overcome, but I see indications that they try to address problems.

I think that the biggest thing that determines good elections that you have real competition between the political parties and Georgia has several, probably six, or seven parties and blocs of a significant size. And this real competition between the parties will have a positive impact on the democracy in the country.