EDITORIAL: Will the real ECN please stand up?

In this election year, every move the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) makes will be looked at with a magnifying glass. The shocking deregistration of two opposition novices, Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) and the Christian Democratic Voice (CDV), is one of the commission’s actions that will be highly scrutinised in the coming days.First, because if ECN got this wrong, its ability to handle a bigger national exercise – namely the 2024 general election in November – will be seriously questioned. But the opposite is also true: This could spell the beginning of a new, no-nonsense ECN, which will stick to the strict application of the law.The latter scenario will come in handy for our country, whose trust in the ECN has often been half-hearted. The electoral commission&#039;s devotion to lawfulness has not always been beyond reproach. For example, it had to take a court to order ECN in 2019 to discard the use of electronic voting machines that had no verifiable paper trail, as the law required. Whether the 2019 presidential winner was Martin Lukato of the National Democratic Party or the Republican Party’s Henk Mudge, we will never know.ECN was also clumsy in its handling of the Popular Democratic Movement’s (PDM) members of parliament, and lost another court case in that regard. This, in short, was a comic display of a body that doesn’t follow rules. We thus hope the deregistration of these parties was by the book. Anything short of this will further erode our trust in ECN ahead of a crucial election.

EDITORIAL: Will the real ECN please stand up?

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Namibian Sun 2025-04-11

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EDITORIAL: Will the real ECN please stand up?

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Namibian Sun 2025-04-11

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