The Electoral Office of Jamaica, is reporting that approximately 40,000 persons have registered for the May 31 voters' list.

This is about 10,000 more than the number of electors who were on the last voters' list.

According to Director of Elections, Danville Walker, almost 9,000 persons have so far been re-verified.

Impending general election

He said the impending general elections have contributed significantly to the increase in voter registration.

Saturday was the deadline for persons to be registered and re-verified for the new voters' list, which, at last count, had more than 1.3 million eligible voters.

In explaining the relatively large turnout of persons to be registered, Mr. Walker said, "Once you have an election in the air you will have a awareness of the voters' list and therefore persons will come out. It's just like when we were doing the re-verification exercise that year we had a much larger number of people registering".

Mr. Walker, who was speaking with the Power 106 news centre, added, "Once you're in the field doing any work or there is an election, there's more awareness and more people are going to come out".