Current number of voters, 3,580,447, will probably be reduced by 10,000 or 15,000 after the Central Election Commission (CEC) completes ongoing corrections in the voters list, Zurab Kharatishvili, the chairman of Central Election Commission, said on April 19.
 
CEC has so far corrected 16,000 inaccuracies of various types based on data submitted by those political parties, which have carried out re-checking process with funds allocated from the state budget. The process of making corrections is still ongoing, said Kharatishvili, who presented CEC’s voter list-related activities before foreign and local observers.

Inaccuracies, reported by the parties, he said, mainly include duplicate records; 8,500 cases of presence of names of deceased persons in the list (over 2,800 have so far been removed); 60 cases when 20 and more voters are registered at a single address.

Kharatishvili said that in addition CEC, in cooperation with Civil Registry, corrected total of 133,000 entries in the list – mainly mistakes in names or addresses where voters are registered.

CEC plans to remove from the list those 6,680 voters, who become internally displaced person from Kodori Gorge and breakaway South Ossetia after the August, 2008 war and who are not yet registered at any address.

Many opposition parties are concerned that the current number of voters in the list - 3,580,447 - might be inflated. One of the concerns for the opposition is presence of those voters in the list, who in fact are no longer living in Georgia. 

The CEC Chairman said that upon its request, the commission has initially received from the Border Police list of those 169,000 citizens, who left the country since January 1, 2008 and have not returned as of January 1, 2010.

On April 15 CEC received an updated list and it included 121,000 names, meaning that 48,000 among those who have left the country since January 1, 2008, returned back to Georgia as of mid-April, Kharatishvili said.

Deadline for making corrections in the list expires on May 20 – ten days before the election day.

CEC Chairman said that his administration planned to involve precinct election commissions in the process of voter list rechecking and to constantly update lists until May 20, when the deadline for making changes to the lists expires.