DEVELOPING AND MANAGING VOTERS REGISTRATION SYSTEM

Introduction
Voters’ registration is a process in which qualifying citizens are registered in order for them to be eligible to vote in an election. Voters registration is a process whose output is the voters’ roll which is basically a list containing the necessary details of all individuals who are eligible to cast their votes in an election.
Governments operating under democratic principles around the world have to invest in this process in order to ensure smooth transition of power when time comes. Elections have been a major source of violence and consequently wars when one side feels that it wasn’t given a fair chance in the process. With this in mind, it is important for states to have proper voters roll in order to carry out elections in a credible and peaceful manner.
If this process is not conducted in a transparent and collaborative manner, the credibility of the election process will as well be put into jeopardy at the end of the day. It this process which sets the stage of an election to be acceptable or add more credible reasons to rendered the election as not free and fair.
In Tanzania, early voters’ registrations involved writing details of voters in a ‘counter’ book and have that book retrieved for verification on the Election Day. Voters were not given any sort of identification for them to keep as a form of authentication; no photographs of the ‘would be’ voters were being taken or kept by the registration clerks. On the day of the election, the verification of the voter was on the hands and memory of the political party clerks who were normally people who lived in the locality. These clerks were the ones responsible for authenticating that if the person is the one who claims to be in the registry and once agreed then the voter would be issued with a ballot paper and allowed access to the