22 Feb 2006

Samoa elections office cross-checking final voter list

2:25 pm on 22 February 2006

Samoa's elections commissioner, Tanuvasa Isitolo Lemisio, says just over 79-thousand people have registered to vote in the general election at the end of next month.

Tanuvasa says this figure is final.

For the first time, would-be voters have had to give fingerprints and photos in an effort to prevent a repeat of registration fraud at the 2001 election.

Then, 92-thousand people registered, with many people registering three or four times.

Tanuvasa says his staff are still physically checking the forms filled out by each voter against the data on the computer.

"We have to ensure that there are no mispellings, there are no misplacements of names on the wrong district or constituency or all that, it's a painstaking exercise."