President Akufo-Addo has expressed his goodwill to the Electoral Commission over its new compilation of voter’s register.
Delivering his 15th COVID-19 update to the nation, the President described as remarkable the ability of the Ghanaian to conduct an exercise such as the compilation of a new voters’ register for a general election in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 outbreak.
“I congratulate warmly the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs. Jean Mensa, her two Deputies, Dr. Eric Asare Bossman and Mr. Samuel Tettey, and the entire Commission for the efficient, safe, transparent nature of the registration exercise, where, for the first time in our nation’s history, Ghanaians were provided with daily updates of the numbers of eligible voters registered, together with a specific age, gender, regional breakdowns, and breakdowns of identity documents”.
Despite some teething challenges encountered during the registration process, coupled with some ambivalence over the need and success of the exercise, the president indicated that eligible voters embraced the process.
“But, at the end of the day, Ghanaians did their civic duty, by going out to register, having found that the process was overwhelmingly orderly, peaceful, and safe”.
“However, there were those who expressed various degrees of hysteria and negativity towards the exercise, with some, who swore heaven and earth to resist the compilation of the register at the peril of their lives, ending up registering”.
“There were also those who offered delicate, personal sacrifices in the event of the register, again, ending up registering. And, there were those who claimed that, in the midst of a pandemic, the registration exercise should not be conducted, with some warning of an “explosion” in our case count and very high numbers of deaths, should the exercise go ahead”, he said.
Independent audit of register
The voter registration exercise, which officially ended on August 6, 2020, did so with 16,963,306 persons registered to vote.
The Electoral Commission has already inaugurated a 16-member Adjudication Committee chaired by Deputy EC boss responsible for Operations, Samuel Tettey, political party representatives, civil society groups and IT personnel of the commission to manually determine cases of duplicated voter registrations.
It has been tasked with manually reconciling cases where registrants’ facial and biometric features as captured by the biometric registration kits conflict.
The incidences of multiple registrations that will come before the committee will be those that are flagged by the automatic biometric identification system without being resolved.
