20100712
reuters

ABIJDAN (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's electoral commission announced on Monday that it had enlarged its provisional voter list to 5.77 million from 5.3 million to include voters who were too young at the last polls.

The new provisional list will be published on Thursday.

The world's biggest cocoa grower has not held an election since 2000 and elections are seen as vital to restoring normality and wooing investors back to the once prosperous nation, bitterly divided since a 2002-3 war.

Elections were originally due to be held in 2005, but rows over rebel disarmament and voter identity have led to repeated delays.

The electoral process has been stalled since February, when Laurent Gbagbo dissolved the electoral commission after accusing its former head, an opposition leader, of illegally adding names to the register.

There still remains a dispute over another "grey" list of about 1 million would-be voters whose nationality is in doubt, a row that has become a major hurdle to the final electoral roll.

"The next stage is first to work for the re-opening of the voter contestation period," Independent Electoral Commission boss Youssouf Bakayoko told journalists in Abidjan.

"After that, we can produce a definitive list."

Gbagbo's nationalist supporters suspect the grey list is full of foreign impostors from Burkina Faso and Mali. They want it audited from scratch, which could take months.

Critics accuse Gbagbo of deliberately delaying the process because he fears he will lose if Ivory Coast goes to the polls now, a charge he denies.