Is voter registration necessary to free and fair elections?
The Election Commission has introduced a high-tech biometric based voter registration and identification system with financial support of the donor countries and technical support of Interpeace, a Geneva based international nongovernmental organization, and consulting subcontractors of Interpeace in India, who manage the voter registration server. Somaliland does not have a system of vital registration to verify citizenship, identity and age of potential voters. All of these requirements had to be verified during the registration process. The local partisans of the political parties in their campaign to register their supporters presented the voter registration as a key factor both in the partys performance in the election and in the allocation of parliamentary seats in future elections, thereby encouraging under age and multiple registrations of voters. The preliminary counts of registered voters are more than two times the total number of the voters in the last presidential elections
