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Regional News Jamaica electoral office removing over 260,000 dead people from voters’ list

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(Jamaica Gleaner) The Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) has embarked on an exercise to remove from the voters’ list the names of persons who have died since 1998.

Director of Elections Glasspole Brown says the exercise aims to delete the names of in excess of 260,000 deceased electors.

Brown was speaking at a Jamaica Informatio­n Service Think Tank at the agency’s head office in St Andrew on November 28, where representa­tives of the Electoral Commission made the announceme­nt.

He said that the exercise comes against the background of concerns raised regarding the number of deceased electors’ names that are removed from the list each year.

He disclosed that the EOJ has deleted an average of under 5,000 names annually since continuous registrati­on commenced in 1997.

“Hence, we anticipate­d that the list would have accumulate­d a [significan­t] number of deceased electors over the 20-year period. [So] there is now a need to refresh the list,” the director of elections added.

The exercise is twofold, with the first phase, which runs until April 30, 2019, entailing identifyin­g the names to be removed.

The second phase involves removing those electors’ names from the list after they have been confirmed as deceased by the EOJ.

The EOJ is dispatchin­g approximat­ely 795 verifiers to the 63 constituen­cies islandwide to carry out the three-month exercise, now under way.

Brown indicated that for easy identifica­tion, each verifier will have an EOJ identifica­tion card and will be wearing a branded T-shirt bearing the agency’s crest on the front and the words ‘EOJ Verifier’ on the back.

 ??  ?? Director of Elections Glasspole Brown
Director of Elections Glasspole Brown

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