The Electoral Commission says it has restored the names of persons that were said to have been missing from the provisional voters’ register.
Several concerns about the missing names came up during the voter exhibition exercise and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) highlighted large numbers of missing names from areas believed to be aligned to the party.
The NDC’s flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, and his running mate Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman suspended their campaign tours to return to Accra to complain about the issue at a press conference.
However, the Chairperson of the Commission, Jean Mensa, at it’s Let the Citizen Know forum on Monday, September 28, 2020, said the problem was mainly due to unintentional human and administrative errors.
“We have successfully retrieved and continue to retrieve valid applicants who were missing from the register. We have updated our electronic register with the missing data. An example is the case of Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region. The purported 7,000 plus names who were said to have been deliberately removed from the register are on the electronic register. It is important to note that the updated register capturing the missing names were also sent to the exhibition centres reflecting some of these missing names before the end of the process.”
Duplicate voter ID numbers remedied
The EC has also rectified duplicate voter identification numbers that were earlier detected during the registration process.
Such affected applicants have been re-issued new ID numbers.
“To prevent the duplication of voter ID numbers, each kit is given a unique code. What we realised during the registration was that in instances where the registration kits become faulty, they were withdrawn from the field and a new one was sent to the field and the same code was put on the new one. The same code as the one withdrawn was placed on the new one. However, when the faulty kit was brought back to the field, that code was not changed and so you realised that we had two kits with the same code and this meant that they would produce the same ID numbers”, Mrs Mensa said.
Background
The Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashaiman, Ernest Henry Norgbey had earlier alleged that the names of some 21,000 prospective voters including his had been omitted from the constituency’s register.
Other members of the NDC have also raised concerns over missing names of voters within the party’s strongholds.
But the electoral management body refuted claims it has deliberately removed the names of some persons from the voters’ register.
The commission insisted that voters who duly registered and were issued with Voter ID Cards but cannot find their names on the provisional register can rectify the situation using the voter exhibition exercise.
The EC also said it has been transparent with the data from the voter registration exercise which saw 16.9 million persons register to vote.
Click below to listen to Jean Mensa as she explains the issues that rocked the voter exhibition exercise:
