The voters register, the list of all eligible voters in a country, is a crucial element in ensuring and maintaining electoral credibility, integrity and legitimacy.
By maintaining a reliable and accurate voters register, the electoral management body recognises citizens who are eligible to vote. The basic principle at the core of the existence of a voters register is 'one person, one ballot'.

There will be at least two locally-organised observer missions for these elections, in addition to expected observer teams from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), SADC Parliamentary Forum, African Union and the United Nations.
The Namibia Institute for Democracy (NID) has trained 300 local election observers who will be deployed in all regions for the November elections. The observers are drawn from a number of civil society groups.

The DTA of Namibia has issued its 2009 manifesto in two formats – a short leaflet outlining key policies and a more detailed eight-page publication.
As part of its shorter version manifesto, under the theme “You Deserve Better”, the DTA says: “If elected to government it will actively address the situation in which our young people find themselves – ineffective education and unemployment that leads to growing poverty and a lack of hope for the future.”

By the time the deadline passed for the registration of party candidates for the National Assembly election, the number of parties contesting the November 27-28 poll had grown to 14. The Communist Party of Namibia, led by Attie Beukes and Harry Boesak, became the 14th party to register candidates on October 19. The Communist Party was previously known as the Workers Revolutionary Party. 12 parties have registered presidential candidates, with Monitor Action Group (MAG) and the National Democratic Party (NDP) choosing not to put forward candidates.

Election Watch is aware of the following party websites. You can review them by clicking on the links below:
DTA
Nudo
RDP
Swanu
Swapo
The Electoral Commission of Namibia is also now online:
ECN

Currently 32 percent of elected National Assembly MPs are women (23 out of the 72 MPs). The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is committed to having 50 percent women’s representation in national parliaments by 2015. The prospects for achieving this in Namibia are not good.

According to the New Era newspaper of October 7 2009, 992 Namibians abroad registered during the September 17 to 30 supplementary registration period. During the last election in 2004 just over 800 people voted at Namibia's foreign missions. At that time it was not possible to register abroad. It is not known how many in the Namibian diaspora still retain their voter registration cards from 2004 and therefore did not need to register anew. Namibians abroad will vote on November 13. The breakdown for the various registration centres abroad is as follows:

Angola 13
Austria 28

The Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) has been able to register 290,600 voters through this year’s Supplementary Voter Registration compared to only 82,321 who registered in the 2004 Supplementary Voter Registration. This represents a 253% increase. In the Khomas region, the number of people registered went up by a phenomenal 915%. These figures do not include Namibian citizens living abroad, who have yet to be added.

So far Election Watch has received manifestos from 7 of the 13 registered parties. You can review them by clicking on the links below:
APP
CoD
DTA
MAG
Nudo
RDP
Swanu

All the parties registered with the Electoral Commission of Namibia have signed up to a Code of Conduct which forbids intimidation and incitement to violence ahead of the November 27-28 2009 elections