1.2m new voters added to electoral roll, new register for 2020 elections

The Electoral Commission (EC) has registered a total of 1.2million new voters under the limited voter registration exercise which ended last week, out of the number, the registration of 8,500 new voters were challenged.

According to the commission, the 1.2million figure was provisional since it was still checking the actual figure with the Voter Management System (VMS) to delete multiple registrations.

Dr Serebuor Quaicoe, the Director of Electoral Services, said the commission had initially projected to register about 700,000 but ended up with 1.2million.

“But I say it’s a provisional figure because we are now checking on the machine itself, we always have to use pendrive to take the data from the system into the VMS, we want to be sure we have captured everybody who registered, we come out with actual figure.

“The law states your name should appear only once on register but when we started exporting figures into the database, there is high rate of multiple registrations, Ashanti Region registered the highest number of 209,810 new voters followed by Greater Accra, Eastern and Central regions.

“This year the challenge system was low, maybe we are understanding ourselves because some challenges are flimsy, the person will just look at your face and say you are not a Ghanaian, you are under age but when they appeared before the committee, we realised challenge had no basis,” Dr Quaicoe stated.

On the creation of new constituencies, he explained that the constitution provided seven years after previous demarcation of constituencies, the commission could revise or after publication of census results since there has been a lot of applications for the creation of new constituencies but the commission had not taken decision to either create or not to create.

Relatedly, the EC has stated that its decision to compile a new voters’ register for the 2020 elections was because its current biometric machines are outdated.

According to the commission, the current machines EC is using are outdated,  no longer producing parts for them, getting parts to service them is a challenge,  the commission‘s decision  yet to be made public but intended to compile  new register for 2020.

The current machines will be used for district level election and the referendum after which a new voters’ register compiled for presidential and parliamentary elections involving new solution, machines and biometric verification machines. -myjoyonline.com/3news.com