ODIHR: „The government has made significant efforts to ensure the accuracy of electoral registers” 

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has released an interim report on the October 8 parliamentary elections. The report states that the government has taken every possible measure to ensure the accuracy of the electoral register.

Two leading agencies have been actively involved in verifying the electoral registers: the Ministry of Justice and the Public Service Development Agency, which are responsible for their respective areas of expertise.

The report states that the government has made significant efforts to verify electoral registers. The Public Service Development Agency has been working to input biometric data into a state register in order to eliminate discrepancies in the lists. To address inconsistencies, Door-to-Door checks have been conducted and a facial recognition program has been implemented to correct duplicate entries.

LEPL Public Service Development Agency of the Ministry of Justice has been actively engaged for many years in efforts to clarify the potential voters’ register, specifically:

Since 2012, the Agency has been actively involved in identifying and addressing gaps in databases in order to provide the Central Election Commission with the most comprehensive identification data of citizens for voters’ registration purposes. At present, the list of potential voters includes data on 3.500.000  persons. At this point, 2 458 599 citizens are represented on the list of potential voters with biometric photographs, which indicates that the data regarding this number of voters is accurate and reliable. In 2012, only 778.207 such records were present in electoral registers. Since 2013, upon the initiative of the Minister of Justice of Georgia, 1 137 150 citizens have received electronic identity cards at no cost or at a reduced price (946 286 were issued free of charge).In October 2015, the Public Service Development Agency launched the “Electoral Register Improvement Project-2” one year before the upcoming elections. As part of this initiative, a number of measures were implemented to compile a high-quality and accurate electoral register. To achieve this goal, the Agency pursued several strategies, including:  

• Photo Comparison – 2 008 432 records were verified. 488 duplicate and 137 forged records were cancelled. 1 393 records with incorrectly linked photos were corrected.
• Identification and Registration of Death Facts – 3 628 death records were compiled. Deceased individuals (including those who died abroad and in occupied territories) were removed from the database.
• Reduction of Records without Photographs and with Low-Quality Photographs in the Database – 1 135 records were restored. 15 records were cancelled due to duplications discovered during the process. 6 566 photographs were searched and added to the database from the documents without photographs issued by consular services.
• Gender Mismatch and Mistakenly Linked Photos Detection- 40 000 records were examined. 252 records with issues were corrected.
• Free issuance of documents – during the project period, 336 871 identification documents were issued as part of free campaigns organized by the Ministry of Justice of Georgia. Through these campaigns, citizens were able to resolve various issues related to being added to the electoral register.

After the successful completion of the „ Electoral Register Improvement Project -2” project, Georgia will have the highest-quality electoral register in the elections in October 2016, for the period after independence.

The Election Observation Mission of the OSCE Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) began its work on August 30. The interim report assessed the measures taken by the government regarding the electoral process prior to September 19.