The deadline for voter registration has been pushed by two weeks to May 7, 2021, officials at the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) have announced. Electoral officials are confronted with organisational and logistical hurdles in the run-up to the sixth national elections scheduled for the first week of June 2021. Political uncertainty, the war in the Tigray region, and widespread conflicts across the country have made it difficult to open electoral offices, where half of the over 50,000 remain unopened. Completing voter registration within the deadline initially set for April 23 was found to be unattainable. Only around 18.5 million voters of the 50 million expected to register have taken cards up until last week. The extension in the Afar and Somali regional states will last an extra week, seeing as most electoral offices in the two regions remained closed due to security concerns while offices elsewhere were operational.
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