NEBE offers training to election officers

April 27, 2005

The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) provided a two-day training to constituency election officers on the voting, counting and result tabulation processes. About 180 election officers received the first-round training, while the remaining ones will be trained in the coming three rounds.

“The training is basically aimed at familiarizing election officers with new systems which had not been covered in the previous training sessions,” says Tesfaye Mengesha, Deputy Head of NEBE Secretariat. “The assignment of two more election officers at each polling station and the use of a coded seal at the back of ballot papers are among the issues dealt with during the training.”

The trainees, all of whom heads of constituencies, were briefed on the recruitment, training and assignment of two additional election officers. They were also offered a practical training on how to use the coded seal to be stamped at the back of each ballot paper, which is believed to be more effective in ensuring secrecy of balloting than the previous system of putting signatures of election officers.

As regards the announcement of results, Tesfaye said in this year’s elections results at constituency level would be publicized after each constituency has received the results of the votes of higher learning institutions students in the country, the counting of which would be conducted by the NEBE Secretariat.

The constituency heads would soon train polling station election officers in their respective areas. There are 547 constituencies in Ethiopia each consisting of 100,000-120,000 inhabitants.