Voter Exhibition Anomalies: EC holds IPAC meeting today

The Electoral Commission (EC) is set to meet political parties to address reported challenges associated with the new voters’ register.

The Director of Electoral Services at the EC, Dr Serebour Quaicoe, confirmed the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting to theghanareport.com.

The EC is expected to brief participants which would include some civil society organisations (CSOs) on the ongoing voter exhibition exercise and solutions to ensure a register accepted by all stakeholders.

The exhibition started on Friday, September 18 and expected to end on September 25.

But there are widespread reports of missing names, duplicate voter ID numbers and other concerns observed at various registration centres across the country

Acknowledging errors, Dr Quaicoe said it was the reason the exercise was being conducted in order to obtain a credible voter roll for the 2020 polls.

The opposition NDC had said that there were huge numbers of missing names, with claims of as much as sometimes over 90% of prospective voters.

Some critics also cited the EC for doing fresh registration with videos circulating on social media to back the claims.

But the EC said the reports were false as the printing is to correct duplicates.

The development has forced flagbearer of the NDC, former President John Mahama to cut short his tour of the Bono Region to return to Accra.

“In any exhibition of a register, there’ll be a few anomalies that are normally easy to correct, but we also know that anytime we’ve done registration of voters, we have done it in good time so that if there are anomalies, we can correct them,” he explained.

“When this government and the Electoral Commission decided that they were going to do a new register, we warned them that the time left was so short that if you compiled a register and there were fatal flaws in the register, you will not have enough time to do the correction before the election”, the former President observed.

“And, therefore, because of the seriousness of the reports I’m receiving from my elections directorate, I’ve decided to curtail my campaign in the Bono Region and go back to Accra to ascertain and verify the reports and to make the views of our party known to Ghana and the rest of the world”, he said.

The NPP, on the other hand, has said that its registration agents were monitoring the exhibition closely and what has been gathered do not reflect the position of the NDC.

The Director of Election and Research at the NPP, Mr Evans Nimako, emphasised that there Ghana’s laws stipulate that“ corrections can be made to details of a voter and where your name is not found, you can cause it to be inserted unto the electoral roll and so for us this process is ongoing and we are monitoring it as such.”

“We know that for this process, registered voters are supposed to visit registration centres and crosscheck their details. Where there are problems, they can cause the changes to be corrected and whatsoever, and we know that the law must apply.”

For him, the NDC was making baseless allegations due to their resolve to frustrate the process, hence an antagonistic approach to the new register from inception.