There are 333,006 eligible voters for the general election and by Tuesday evening, 8,200 documents were undelivered or not collected.
The figure is much less than in previous elections because the nine-week electoral campaign gave the police more time to distribute voting documents door to door, said the Chief Electoral Commissioner Salvu Gauci, in a press briefing at the counting hall this morning.
There were 10,082 uncollected documents at the end of last week yet 1,200 were collected on Monday and another 664 were collected on Tuesday.
The deadline for the collection of voting documents is at midnight on Thursday and these can be collected from the Electoral Office, Valletta and at the Identity Cards Office, Victoria, Gozo, for voters registered at Gozo.
All is set for the weekend. The candidate names and result boards are up, the staff has been trained and a mock counting exercise was held last weekend.
The sorting of votes for the general election is expected to start at 11am on Sunday at the Naxxar counting hall, after all the ballot boxes would have been opened during the night and the ballots sorted in batches of 50.
Sorting is the process when votes start being distributed according to candidate names and political parties start taking their samples. As a result, the political leaders are expected to give an indication of the result one or two hours later and before official results start coming out, unless, the result is too close.
Advanced voters, including electoral commissioners, assistant electoral commissioners who will be working at hospitals and people who will be will be abroad on Saturday and have voted last Saturday at the counting hall. On Friday, hospital patients, including those at St Vincent de Paul (and those who would have been dismissed from hospital but are registered there), will be voting.
Having been transported to the counting hall prior to other ballot boxes, these will start to be opened at 10pm on Saturday. A total of 91 boxes can be opened and the votes will be distributed in batches of 50.
Prior to this year, shops, business establishments and clubs within 50metres of a place of voting were not allowed to open on election day however, this year, only political clubs within a distance of 50 metres will not be opening.
A rolling register was introduced as from this year and people who have their 18th birthday by Friday will be able to vote on Saturday. There are 2,000 new voters and their voting documents were issued on the basis of their 16+ identity cards.
Voting takes place between 7am and 10pm on Saturday in every town and village. In addition, half the localities will also be voting to elect representatives on their local councils. There are 18,300 uncollected voting documents for local council elections and 14,000 voters are expatriates.
Saturday’s election is the 23rd general election since 1921.