With less than four months to go before the presidential election set for December 5th, The Gambia is going through a tense episode over the reliability of its voter register. The dispute, born out of conflicting figures published after the supplementary voter registration exercise carried out between April and May, took a new turn on August 1st, when the Chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, Joseph Colley, told a parliamentary committee that around 14,000 registrations were currently under review for possible removal from the roll.
It all started with a discrepancy in the numbers revealed at a forum held in June at the Kairaba International Conference Centre. The Electoral Commission had announced there that 212,095 Gambians had registered during the supplementary exercise. But the dataset handed to political parties, on flash drives, showed only 179,445, a difference of more than 32,000 people. Faced with protests, the institution first explained that registrations from April 8th had been mistakenly left out of the initial file, bringing the corrected total to 183,163. The gap remained substantial nonetheless, at around 29,000 voters.
The main opposition party, the United Democratic Party, led the charge, without turning the matter into an outright accusation. Its secretary general and leader, Ousainou Darboe, repeated on several occasions that his party did not suspect the Electoral Commission of fraud or wrongdoing, but was simply asking for a full reconciliation of the figures and access to the raw data. He even made a point of calling on his supporters to remain calm, insisting that his party’s goal was not confrontation but building confidence in the electoral process. According to his technical team’s calculations, even after deducting the duplicate registrations identified by the Commission, roughly 14,600 voters remained whose status stayed unexplained.
It is precisely on this point that Joseph Colley’s announcement in early August marks a notable development in the affair. The figure of 14,000 registrations currently under re-examination, revealed during a hearing before lawmakers, closely matches the discrepancy the opposition had raised weeks earlier. The Commission chairman nonetheless noted that the number could still change, as the verification exercise had not been completed. Lawmakers present at the hearing asked what means would be made available to voters to find out whether their own registration was among the files affected by this review. In response, the institution said it was working on mechanisms that would allow every citizen to check their registration status and confirm their polling station ahead of election day.
This review is part of a broader process of validating the voter register, which has been ongoing since the supplementary registration exercise closed on May 21st. The Commission also reported that its biometric matching system had flagged more than 24,000 suspected cases of double registration, a criminal offence under Gambian electoral law that could result in prosecution or disqualification from voting for those involved. An appeals and objections mechanism also remains open, with the Commission having already received 1,600 complaints from citizens or political actors over issues of eligibility or residency. Magistrates from the Revising Court, appointed by the Chief Justice, are set to rule on these cases before the provisional register is merged with the one established in 2021.
Several lawmakers also called on the Commission to step up its public awareness campaigns, arguing that a significant portion of the population remains poorly informed about the differences between new registration, transfer of residence and voter card replacement, which they said could undermine some citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to vote.
Ahead of a presidential election widely seen as an important test for the country’s democratic consolidation, ten years after the 2016 political transition, the reliability of the voter register has emerged as one of the central issues of public debate in The Gambia. The Electoral Commission says it intends to manage the process with transparency and impartiality; what remains to be seen is whether the expected publication of a final register will be enough to dispel the doubts raised by the opposition and parts of civil society.