Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): How will the government increase the participation in the elections scheduled on November 22nd given that it is widely expected to be boycott? How will the government hide the huge increase of the electoral bloc based on random naturalization exercised by the authority during the past four years?

We raised this question to a parliamentary reference, an expert in voters' statistics and who has already participated in monitoring previous election sessions. This expert says, "By issuing in law the decree 14 for 2014 related to amending the decree of exercising the political rights, the King aimed to exclude a big bloc of the opposition whom the authority knows will boycott. The authority replaced these opposers by recently naturalized individuals.

But How?

The authority waited on the opposition's decision in boycotting the coming elections and accordingly the king issued on 22nd September 2014 decree number 57 for 2014 concerning the amending of law by decree 14 about exercising the political rights. The amended stipulated dangerous thing; it tackled amending the voters' list in Article 8, part 2: "The list of voters must include all those eligible to vote according to article 2 of this Law so as not to be deprived of his political rights during the preparation of the list of voters or during the correction stage. The list will include the voters name and address," illustrates the expert.

This is the "secret of the game", according to him, stressing that the expression "taking into account the previous participation in the elections" has allowed "The Elections and referendums Supervisory committee" to exclude huge numbers of the bloc who did not participate in the previous elections and who are expected not to participate even this year.

However, the bloc was replaced by great numbers of naturalized citizens who served as voters instead of the excluded from the lists names.

The parliamentary reference added, "The authority will show through this replacing that the increased number of voters from 2010 to 2014 is normal. If the electoral bloc in 2010 was about 320 thousands voters compared to 350 thousands voters in 2014; i.e. an increase of 30 thousands voters. This is a normal rise in the ordinary cases;however, it is not in Bahrain."

He continues, "Those who were naturalized during the past three years and until now are two times more than this number. Yet, through replacing, the authority will hide this increase in the population which was going to reveal the huge numbers of the randomly naturalized during this period."

"We examined the existence of a group of names in 2014 electoral bloc through Bahrain Vote website by entering the personal number and date of birth of the voters who did not update their data and we discovered that a number of people's names were not found, whereas, other people's names appeared instead. This means excluding an unknown number of voters," he expressed.

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