IEC Chairman Pledges Credible Voter Register Ahead of 2026 Presidential Election

By Fatou Sillah

The chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, Joseph Colley, has sought to reassure Gambians about the integrity of the voter register ahead of the 2026 presidential election, saying the commission is working to correct irregularities and ensure that eligible voters are properly included.

Mr. Colley said the commission was addressing issues identified during the registration process, including duplicate registrations, as it prepared the final list of voters. He said the public should not lose confidence in the process, arguing that the register would be credible once the revising court completes its work.

“No, I don’t think anybody should lose confidence, because at the end of the revising court, we will give you a credible register,” Mr. Colley said. “I can assure people that anybody who is registered and is supposed to be on that register is on the register; nobody is omitted or deleted who should have been on the register.”

He said names removed during the process belonged to people found to have registered more than once. The commission, he added, had previously offered an amnesty to people involved in multiple registrations.

Mr. Colley also acknowledged a longstanding limitation of the voter roll: It may still contain the names of people who have died since the 2021 election.

Under the current legal framework, he said, the commission does not have provisions allowing it to remove deceased voters from the register. But he stressed that the presence of their names did not mean ballots could be cast on their behalf, saying election officials have safeguards to identify attempted impersonation.

“We can never have a 100 percent register,” Mr. Colley said, referring to the difficulty of maintaining a list that fully reflects deaths and other changes in the population. “All those people who died from 2021 to now, you cannot delete; their names are still on, but they cannot vote. We will detect impersonation, and we will take you to court.”

The chairman said the commission was also considering longer-term changes to modernize voter registration, including the introduction of continuous registration and closer integration with a future civil registration system.

Such a system, he said, could eventually allow eligible Gambians to be added to the voter roll automatically when they reach voting age, reducing reliance on periodic registration exercises and helping keep the register up to date.