Voter Registration in Sierra Leone

DRS worked with the Interim National Electoral Commission (INEC) of the Republic of Sierra Leone with the registration of more than1.5 million voters.

Working within very tight time and cost constraints DRS designed and printed nearly three million voter registration forms to record the name and address of potential voters.

Each registration form was barcoded with a unique self-checking serial number. (The use of barcodes rather than old fashioned ‘binary’ codes often used on OMR forms greatly increases the reliability of the data.)

In addition to the supply of OMR forms DRS also supplied INEC with three high speed OMR readers that were used by INEC staff in Freetown to read the completed registration forms.

Reading of the 1,500,000 forms began on the 22nd of January 1996 and finished 17 days later. During this time DRS supplied on-site training, and hardware and software support.

The success of using OMR for voter registration in Sierra Leone and Ghana contrasts sharply with the failure of some other African countries using traditional methods.