2013
Jordan Parliamentary Elections
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During registration, Jordanians who had changed their place of residence were allowed to
choose to vote in either their home district or in the district where they currently reside.
While this stipulation was welcomed overall for assigning voters to a district, thereby
reducing the chance of multiple voting, concerns were raised that it opened up the possibility
of voters being subjected to pressure regarding their selection of district, meaning in the
Jordanian context pressure from family members to vote for candidates from their tribe. In
particular, families living in urban settings were less likely to vote for a candidate in their
current place of residence, instead travelling back to their home district to support their own
tribal candidate.
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Christians, Chechens and Circassians received the right to register to vote in a district where
a seat was reserved for a member of their community if such a seat was not available in the
district of their residence.
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For the first time in Jordan, voters had to choose the polling station at which they would
cast their ballot on Election Day at the time of registration. This stipulation allowed for the
creation of precise voter lists in each polling station, which facilitated the provision of
sufficient ballots for each station, and thus made double voting or other forms of
manipulation less likely.
Generally, civil society gave the voter registration process a positive assessment. Of those whose
names became part of the voter registry, most voters signed up of their own free will and not
because they were coerced, or worse possibly paid, to do so by potential candidates. In addition,
unauthorized incidents of group registration and illegal transfer of voter cards were limited, while
the majority of cards were issued without mistakes. Though a significant portion of the population
had a family representative process their paperwork for registration, these were largely done by
immediate family members and therefore consistent with the election law.
Nevertheless, the very existence of group registration likely led to a higher number of voters being
registered than would have had to in person. Group registration also abetted in vote buying, with
registrars, lawful or not, withholding voter cards in order to sell them back to their rightful owners.
After the conclusion of the voter registration, the Integrity Coalition for Election Observation and
RASED, issued statements asserting that the process for the most part complied with the new
election law. In their view, any violations that took place were not committed systematically, but
rather stemmed from a lack of training the CSPD staff had received. As such, mistakes were not
expected to significantly affect the results of the registration process or compromise the reliability of
the voter list as the basis for future elections.
The most commonly cited mistakes reported were:
Unlawful group registration
: Observers noted that in some cases CSPD staff handed out
electoral cards without the required check of the family relations, thus enabling persons to
register citizens who were not their immediate family members. This opened the door to
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Statement on the Voter Registration Process, Integrity Coalition for Election Observation, undated; Interview with
RASED representatives, 6 December, 2012.
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Unless otherwise stated, the alleged violations were taken from the Statement #4 of the Civil Coalition for the
Monitoring of the Elections, 4 September, 2012 and the Civil Coalition for the Monitoring of the Elections’ preliminary
report on the verification of preliminary voters’ lists published by the IEC on 5 November, 2012.
