Holding 2020 polls without new register could’ve disenfranchised 800,000 eligible voters – EC

The Electoral Commission has justified the compilation of the new voters’ register insisting the 16.6 million voters captured in the new register so far is a fair count of voters.

Over 19.8 million voters, the electoral management body says would have been recorded if an entirely new register was not prepared.

At the EC’s Let the Citizen Know media encounter today, Friday, August 7, 2020, Deputy Chairman of the Commission responsible for Corporate Services, Dr. Bossman Eric Asare indicated that the mass registration captured a significant portion of the country’s voting population.

He explained that a limited registration exercise would have taken place in all electoral areas and registration centres across the country were estimated to conservatively add about two million Ghanaians onto the existing register.

“Potentially, without the compilation of a new voters’ register, the Commission was on track to have almost 19 million people registered and another 800,000 denied the right to vote. With the compilation of this register, those on the duplicates and exceptions lists from 2012 have had the opportunity to register”, Dr. Asare noted.

The 2019 register had a total of 16,845,420 voters, according to the commission.

But provisional figures from the commission show 16,663,699 persons were captured during the mass voter registration exercise.

The EC also has 797,493 people “quarantined” on multiple registrations and exceptions list.

The Commission has put in place an Adjudication Committee to manually determine cases of duplicated voter registrations.

Estimates from the Ghana Statistical Service indicate Ghanaians who are at least 18 years are 17,624,686, which is 56.9% of the estimated population of almost 31 million.

The EC, however, says it will in the next few days announced to the general public the total number of registered voters when the entire process to certify the register is completed.

“As a Commission, we are pleased with what we have been able to do so far, and we are looking forward to the cooperation of all stakeholders for the success of our 2020 activities”, Dr. Asare added.

Registration statistics 

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 morning.

But “both the Eastern and the Central regions have maintained their previous 9.6 percent and 9.3 percent respectively.”

For the remaining regions, the Western, Western North, Upper West, Northern, and Upper East regions increased their share of voters on the electoral roll.

The Ahafo, Bono, Bono East, Oti, North East, and Savanna regions maintained their percentages.

The commission added that “only the Volta Region reduced in percentage terms in this group.”

Find below the full breakdown