The Executive Director for IMANI Africa has downplayed the Electoral Commission’s (EC) defence for the compilation of a new register.
Mr. Cudjoe argues that the numbers recorded during the mass voter registration exercise would not have been so different if the old register was used.
He made the claim in response to the Deputy Chairman of the EC responsible for Corporate Services, Dr. Bossman Eric Asare’s claim that over 19.8 million voters would have been recorded if an entirely new register was not prepared.
“I do not know where my good friend Dr. Asare was getting his figures from but his statistical analysis was so weak. I think the push to make it look like they have been triumphant on the face of what the statistics were bound to give us is rather unfortunate.”
Franklin Cudjoe believes the EC’s defence was aimed at justifying the decision to spend millions of dollars on the compilation of a new register.
“This attempt to justify almost 150 million dollars on a totally needless exercise is quite worrying. If you study the trend carefully, the numbers we have seen so far is not necessarily different from what would have been exacted anyway.”
16.6 million persons captured
The EC registered 16,663,699 persons during the mass voter registration exercise.
These figures from the commission are provisional.
The commission has put in place an Adjudication Committee to manually determine cases of duplicated voter registrations.
Since the EC’s last briefing, the four top regions in voter share remain the Greater Accra Region, Ashanti Region, Eastern Region and Central Region.
The commission noted that the Greater Accra Region lost some grounds “in percentage terms from 21.34 % to 20.8 percent of the total registered.”
“The Ashanti Region also reduced marginally by 0.1% to its current 17.9 percent,” the commission added at the briefing on Friday, August 7, 2020.
