The Interparty Resistance Against New Voter Register has said the Electoral Commission’s plan to make available a new voter’s register on the 8th November 2020 will hamper further arrangements for the general elections.
The group contends that opening of processes for candidates to file their nominations must be done 42 days before elections.
According to them, the filing of nominations cannot be equally done without a compiled voters’ register.
General Secretary of the NDC addressing the press on Monday said: “The election date is fixed by the Constitution so what will happen is that if the elections cannot happen on that day, then you have already run the country into a constitutional crisis because the term of the President is fixed and beyond January 7 there is nothing anybody can do.”
“Even if the voters’ register is ready by November 8, it is too late for the rest of the processes because as I read to you in the C.I 94, you need a final voters register before you open nominations for candidates to file because if you open nominations and the criteria is that you must be a registered voter before you contest election and there is no voter’s register from which you are going to check your name then you cannot file.”
Meanwhile, the Director of IT for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Osei Kwame Griffiths says the Electoral Commission’s claims that it is cheaper to register over 17 million voters using a new system than to register just about 1.5 million voters when the current system is maintained defies logic.
“They have peddled falsehood that it is cheaper to register 70 million voters using a new system or even less because we are going for a continuous registration before the election and if that happens, it is only about a million or so you need to add to the register and how can that be more expensive than registering 17 million people?”
Their concerns come days after the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting on the dispute over the compilation of a new voters’ register ended in a stalemate.
The meeting was convened at the behest of the Electoral Commission’s (EC) Eminent Advisory Committee, which had called for more dialogue on the issue.
The controversy stemmed from the EC’s plans to abandon its current biometric verification system and procure a new one which has a facial recognition technology.