Voting by touch

THE Electoral Commission of Namibia says it is working very hard to allow blind people to vote independently during next month’s presidential and general elections.

The ECN introduced the Braille ballot template in the 2004 elections and have appointed a visually impaired person to train voters throughout the country.There are around 29 000 visually impaired Namibians.Yesterday, ECN’s Hilda Nakakuwa said ‘hopefully, yes they will’ when asked whether visually impaired Namibians would be afforded the opportunity to cast their votes without any assistance from poll officials or relatives.Until the 2004 elections, blind voters had depended on their relatives or close friends to help them to cast their votes.Officials at the Service Centre in Windhoek said yesterday that the ECN had appointed Josephine Lazarus to train people and that she had already travelled widely to do that.’She is currently in the Caprivi but was also in Kavango,’ one official said.With the compilation of special ballot papers in Braille, visually impaired Namibians can exercise their democratic right to vote in secrecy.The Electoral Act of 1992 states that every individual Namibian has the right to cast their votes in secret.Those who cannot read Braille may still bring along a friend or a relative to help them cast their votes.Similar templates are widely used internationally – most recently in South Africa, Botswana, India and Indonesia.The voter ‘reads’ in Braille the names and numbers of the political parties on the ballot beneath and a line of raised dots leads to a window where they make their mark.