Hardly has the Electoral Commission (EC) finished compiling the new voters’ register than it is already inaugurated an adjudication committee to “clean” the register of multiple registrations.
The 16-member multi-stakeholder committee was inaugurated by the Chairperson of the EC, Mrs Jean Mensa, in Accra Wednesday, August 5, 2020.
According to the election regulator, the committee will be required to manually sort through the list of multiple registrations.
This “cleaning” of the voters’ register is already raising suspicion among critics and IT experts who are questioning how the much-touted new biometric system acquired by the EC could be fooled to register voters more than ones.
The EC had offloaded the existing biometric system saying it was not secure and thus compromised. This was the basis to which the EC controversially pushed through legislations for a new voters’ register that has since sparked confusion and violence across the country.
Chaired by the Deputy Chairman of the EC in charge of Operations, Mr Samuel Tettey, the committee comprises six other officials of the EC; five representatives of political parties and four civil society organisations (CSOs) as its members.
Political parties with representation on the committee are the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the Convention People’s Party (CPP), the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) and the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG).
Among the CSOs on the committee are the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA); Abantu for Development and Penplusbyte.
Throwing light on the work of the committee, Mrs Mensa said the committee members would be presented with a number of cases that were flagged at the de-duplication stage of the multi-faceted mechanism to clean up the voters register.
She explained that the committee would deal with cases that concern persons who have different facial features but have some of their biometric features (fingerprints) matching those of others.
“It will also determine the eligibility of persons who have the same facial features and same fingerprints matching,” she said.
“The Commission is of the view that the voter register is the bedrock on which credible election is built. It is, therefore, important that the new voters register bears the hallmark of integrity,” she added.
The mass voter registration exercise which started on June 31, will end today, Thursday, August 6, 2020. Per available data, some 16.5 million people have been captured in the register, this is some 1.5 million more than the previous one that the EC got rid of.