The Electoral Commission notes that the names of people who were said to have been absent from the provisional registry of electors have been returned.
During the voting exhibition exercise, many questions about the missing names appeared and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) highlighted significant numbers of missing names from places assumed to be associated with the party.
John Dramani Mahama, the NDC flagbearer, and his running mate, Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, suspended their campaign tours at a press conference to return to Accra to protest about the problem.
Nevertheless, at the Let the People Know forum on Monday, September 28, 2020, the Chairman of the Commission, Jean Mensa, said the issue was primarily due to unintended human and administrative errors.
“We have successfully recovered eligible applicants who were absent from the registry and intend to recover them. With the missing info, we have revised our electronic registry. The case of Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region offers an example. In the electronic registry are the alleged 7,000 plus names that were claimed to have been intentionally omitted from the registry. It is important to remember that, before the end of the process, the revised register capturing the missed names was also sent to exhibition centers representing some of these missed names.
Remedied duplicate voter ID numbers
Duplicate voter identity numbers previously found during the registration process have since been rectified by the EC.
Fresh ID numbers have been re-issued for those affected applicants.
“To avoid repetition of voter ID numbers, a unique code is issued to each kit. What we found after the registration was that they were removed from the field in situations where the registration kits were inaccurate and a new one was sent to the field and the same code was placed on the new one. The same code was put on the latest one as the one withdrawn. When the defective kit was taken back to the field, however, the code was not modified and then you found the we had two kits with the same code, which means that the same ID numbers would be made,’ said Mrs Mensa.
Background
Ernest Henry Norgbey, Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashaiman, had previously alleged that the names of some 21,000 prospective voters, including him, had been removed from the registry of the constituency.
Other NDC officials have also expressed questions over lost voters’ names inside the strongholds of the party.
Yet the electoral control agency denied allegations that it had purposely deleted the names of any people from the registry of voters.
The Commission insisted that voters who have been properly enrolled and provided with Voter ID Cards but are unable to locate their names on the provisional registry are able to rectify the condition by means of an exercise in the voter show.
The EC has claimed that the data from the voter registration exercise, which saw 16.9 million people register to vote, was transparent.
Source: https://citinewsroom.com/
Discussion about this post