SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Weeks of knocking on doors and sending out notices have paid off, not for candidates, but for the city clerk's office.

Since August, city clerk Debbie Gillard and her staff have been compiling a list of voters in Yellowknife.

By Wednesday, 6,206 people had been enumerated, their names logged into the city's new voters' list.

The new list is an effort to eliminate names of people who no longer live here or who signed up more than once in the past.

"We had to ensure that the initial data was as accurate as possible," she said.

"When you keep using something over and over and over again, there could be duplications on it. If someone has two addresses or if someone else has the same name in town, you don't know if it's a different person or a duplicate."

Overall, Gillard said the process went smoothly with the exception of the challenges related to entering apartment buildings or getting people to answer their doors.

"Hopefully in the future we won't have to do the door-to-door enumeration," she said.

Gillard said the last time the city started the voters' list from scratch was 1997. She hopes this new list will be used indefinitely. To prevent the ongoing problem of duplicate addresses, Gillard said the city is planning to ask people who close or update their water accounts if they'd also like to update the voters' list.

"We're going to look at all the programs we're able to do this with, but initially this is the biggest one … It would indicate that they moved," she said.

Gillard said approximately 7,000 names were on the voters' list in past elections.

"But it's so hard to tell, Yellowknife can be so transient," she said.

Even though the enumeration deadline has passed, people who haven't signed up yet can still do so when they vote on Monday. If they bring photo identification, they can sign a declaration before marking their ballot.