The CPP and the CNRP hit another stumbling block in their negotiations over a revised election law on Friday, when the parties were unable to agree on how voters will be registered to cast their ballots in future elections.
In a meeting of the bipartisan working group at the National Assembly, the CPP proposed that voters should use their government-issued identification cards at polling stations, while the CNRP pushed for voters to be issued election-specific registration cards by the National Election Committee (NEC).
Kuoy Bunroeun, head of the CNRP’s delegation in the talks, said the opposition party wanted to see a return to the centralized registration system used during the 1993 U.N.-sponsored election.
“We asked for a joint agreement stating that all voters with their names on the voter list shall be offered an election card that is issued by the NEC,” Mr. Bunroeun said.
However, Bin Chhin, a deputy prime minister and the lead negotiator for the ruling party, said the CPP believed that identification cards issued by the Interior Ministry would be sufficient proof of identity come election day.
“For this article, we disagreed,” he said. “They want to issue other types of election cards, like we did during the Untac times when they went out to register [voters] and did not use identification cards.”
“The election cards just copy all the information from the identification cards, so it could lead to spelling mistakes and then citizens will not be able to vote because their names are wrong,” Mr. Chhin said.
But Mr. Bunroeun said that too many people in the country are still without identification cards due to an impossibly slow bureaucracy.
“If the competent ministry specifically pushed for every Cambodian citizen of [voting] age to have identification cards…we will consider it,” he said of the CPP’s proposal. “But so far, many people complain of difficulties making identification cards.”
