EC to compile new voters’ register for 2020 elections

The Electoral Commission says its decision to compile a new voters’ register for the 2020 elections was because its current biometric machines are outdated.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 need for the new voters’ register was necessitated by several factors which included the need to replace the outmoded biometric machines. Speaking in an interview with Radio Ghana in Kumasi, the Director of Electoral Services at the EC, Dr Serebour Quaicoo said since the current machines the EC is using are outdated, the producers are no longer producing parts for them. “The current machines that we are using is outdated, the producers are no more producing it, so getting parts to service them [such as] cartridges, toners is a problem.” “So the Commission has taken a decision, but we are yet to come out publicly, but we intend compiling a new register for 2020,” Dr Quaicoo told Radio Ghana [GBC]. Explaining, he said the current machines would be used for the district level elections and the referendum after which “we are going to compile a new register.” In March 2019, the EC announced it will compile a new voters’ register for the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections in Ghana. The decision was contained in a statement the Commission issued following an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting held Wednesday, March 27, Speaking to Radio Ghana in Kumasi, Dr Serebour Quaicoo said: “we are going to use new solution, new machines and the rest [biometric verification machines]” for the 2020 elections. On the creation of new constituencies, Dr Quaicoo explained that the constitution provides that seven years after the previous demarcation of constituencies, the commission can revise or after the publication of census results. “There has been a lot of application for the creation of new constituencies but for now the commission has not taken a decision to either create or not to create,” he said. On the recent limited voters’ registration exercise, Dr Quaicoo said 1.2 million new voters were registered with 8500 challenge cases. He said the Ashanti Region registered the highest number of 209,810 new voters followed by Greater Accra, then Eastern and Central. “We projected for 700,000 but at the end of the exercise, we registered 1.2million, but I say it’s a provisional figure because we are now checking on machine itself, we always have to use pen drive to take the data from the system into the VMS [Voter Management System], so we want to be sure that we have captured everybody who registered… so that we come out with the actual figure.” “The law states that your name should appear only once on the register but when we started exporting the figures into the database, there is a high rate of multiple registration.” Source: Graphic Online | Ghana]]>