Press Release
Phnom Penh, 04 June 2020

The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) annually observes on voter registration and audits Voter List. Through its observation and audit, COMFREL deployed observers to the registration stations and examined the official voter list to indicate duplicated and ghost voter names to ensure the accuracy of data in voter list.

COMFREL, accordingly to the registration observation and the voter list audit in 2019, concludes that under a reform agenda since 2016, the registration and voter list still have a better quality. But registration for migrant eligible voters is remain as a main challenge.

Voter Registration Preparation: The voter registration and voter list update are to take place annually. In 2019, the registration operated for 22 days with 10,178,809 estimated eligible voters allocated to 23,364 estimated polling stations. The registration operation held with 1,646 registration teams. However, migrant eligible voters were not able to get access to the registration at the foreign countries.

The establishment of new polling station and eligible voter rate for the registration: the polling stations are newly established annually. In 2019 the NEC established more 71 new polling stations for allocating about 372,628 by 2019 eligible voters. COMFREL noted that the registration rate is high on 12th to 15th June when there was a public holiday for the King’s birthday. To compare with the estimation in 2019, the rate is more than 50% in only four provinces including Svay Rieng, Takeo, Palin, and Tboung Khmom.

It is a low turnout of the registration. According to the NEC’s 2019 registration result, there is only 108,272 new eligible voters who are 18 years old by 2019. It is equal to 28.99% of the estimation. COMFREL was not able to access to information about budget expenditure for the registration. Once there was an availability of the information, COMFREL is very consent to discuss with NEC about any alternative registration methods for improving the efficiency of the national budget.

2019 voter list audition: COMFREL found that in the 2019 audit 44 of 8,629,357 voter names have duplicated data. in 2018, there were 89 duplicated voter names. Meaning the number of duplicated voter names has decreased in 2019. It is also noted that according to 2018 audit finding, COMFREL informed those 89 duplicated names to the NEC to expectedly clean the voter list; yet 26 of those are still found in the 2019 voter list. COMFREL is still committed to further discuss those cases with the NEC.

According to the studying the registration documents including Khmer Identity Card (ID) and Identity Certificate for registration (ICR), 26,160 of about 8,6 million voter names had registered with duplicated ID and ICR number. COMFREL also found that 8,196,034 voters equal to 95% had registered with ID and 433,323 voters equal to 5% had registered with ICR. Among the 8,196,034 voters, 608,641 (7.4%) voters were registered with ID version I, 342,951 (4.2%) voters with ID version II and 7,244,442 (88.4%) voters with ID version III.

COMFREL would like to propose the NEC initiatively discuss with the parliaments about a possibility of election laws amendment or establish a new mechanism to register migrant eligible voters outside the country. Furthermore, several recommendations on technical challenge and procedure also have been proposed and submitted to the NEC (see detail in the report https://bit.ly/3eHoWHg).

Should you need further information, please contact:

• Mr. Kim Chhorn, Executive Director (012 942 019)
• Mr. Korn Savang, Coordinator of Monitoring and Advocacy Unit (011 884 840)

Read the full report here: "The 2019 Voter Registration Observation and Voter List Audit Report"