The head of the IT department at the Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Tuesday said the election management body has finalized the database for the voter registration process.

Sayed Ibrahim Sadat, head of IEC’s IT department said that until now, details of 50,000 voters have so far been registered.

According to the IEC, the number of people registered to vote is now over 5.1 million.

Of those who have registered, 3.3 million are male, 1.6 million are female, 97,000 are Kuchis and over 500 belong to the Sikh minority group.

The IEC said that handbooks which contain the information about voters has been scanned by IEC employees in 22 provinces and that they have sent their data to the center.

“With the completion of registration of information, we will come to know the exact number of people registered across Afghanistan and find out how many of those registered are eligible to vote,” said Sadat.

“Our duty is to check all the data about a voter,” said Farzana, an employee in the IEC’s IT department.

“Through this we will see if one person has applied with one ID card several time. If he is under the age of 18, then we will know it,” added Sadat.

Last month the IEC announced that it had prepared the database for the voter registration process through which provincial heads of the institution can update data on a daily basis.

Despite the progress, members of Afghanistan’s civil society institutions and election observers seem skeptical about the IEC’s ability to manage the database.  

The parliamentary and districts councils’ elections is scheduled for October.

The commission has allocated 2,801 seats for parliament and district councils.