By Moutaz Ali
Tripoli, 14 May 2014:
At a press conference today at . . .[restrict]12:00 pm at the High National Electoral Commission (HNEC) headquarters in Tripoli, HNEC president Emad Al-Sayeh gave updated numbers about registered voters and candidates for the House of Representatives elections.
Numbers for registered candidates for the upcoming elections for the House of Representatives have reached 878 candidates for 13 constituencies. This is a significant increase over the past two weeks. The deadline for submitting candidate applications is May 18th. Al-Sayeh stated that no application would be accepted after that.
The number of registered voters has increased from 45,000 to 135,000 in one week. In spite of this HNEC spokesman Haider Badroush told the Libya Herald “the number shows that the people’s interest in elections is still very weak.” He added, “because of this we have established a support center with a hotline number-1441-to help out people who are facing problems in registering.” HNEC has extended the deadline for registration of voters until 29 May. Furthermore, HNEC has extended the deadline for registration of voters until 29th. It should be noted that anyone who registered to vote in the constitutional assembly elections do not have to re-register in order to vote in the House of Representative elections.
The General National Congress (GNC) has recently approved a request from HNEC to change the name of “Polling Center” to “Constituency”. “Our request was due to former elections experiences we have been through such as GNC elections or other experiences” HNEC training manager Ryad Burshan answered when asked the reason behind the name change. “Our updated process now is to have a prime constituency, minor constituency and a polling center. This helps us to have more control of the election process.”
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