The Electoral Commission has inaugurated an Adjudication Committee to determine cases of duplicated voter registrations manually.
The 16-member committee is chaired by Deputy EC boss responsible for Operations, Samuel Tettey, and political party representatives, civil society groups as well as IT personnel of the commission.
The committee has been charged to manually reconcile cases where the facial and biometric features of registrants clashed. However, issues of multiple registrations to be handled by the committee would be those that were identified by the automatic biometric identification and are pending resolution.
At the inauguration, Chairperson of the Commission, Jean Mensa, said the formation of the committee was part of the EC’s efforts to ensure credible elections as we climax the voter registration exercise. She further noted that de-duplication exercise was to make the voter register void of any duplications.
“It is now time to turn our attention to ensuring a clean and credible voters’ register ahead of the 2020 general election. The commission is of the view that the voters’ register is the bedrock on which a credible election is built. It is therefore important that the new voters’ register bears the hallmarks of integrity,” Mrs Mensa said.
“Under this system, the committee is presented with cases that are flagged when the system is unable to determine duplication. Committee members are trained and provided with policies to enable them to determine and rule on the different cases presented to them,” she explained.
Meanwhile, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is demanding an independent audit of the new voter register compiled by the Electoral Commission.
According to the party, the audit will tackle issues deduplication and multiple registration issues recorded in the register.
Speaking at a press conference at the NDC’s headquarters in Accra on Thursday, August 13, 2020, the party’s Director of Election, Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, noted that details of the multiple registrations should be made available to all political parties.
“In fact, the EC needed to replace its system with a more robust system, including the introduction of facial recognition technology. No one has said anything about facial recognition again. When they [EC] speak these days, they don’t talk about it. Technically, any credible Biometric Verification System is able to detect duplicate registration in real-time and address same. So it beats our imagination that this registration in the midst of a deadly pandemic, people will move from one registration centre to another to engage in multiple registrations.”
“Why would they do that? If there are any records of multiple registrations, the EC may have to examine the causes internally because we are reliably informed that the EC’s own system is defective and therefore deduplicates registrants by itself so they should look internally at their systems and processes. That is why we are calling for an independent audit of the entire register in relation to multiple registrations and details of all the multiple registrations on the register should be made available to the political parties for verification. We are highly suspicious of this move because we are aware the management of the EC has transferred almost all the experienced IT experts at the Headquarters to the various regions for very strange reasons,” he said.
Mr. Ankrah also accused the New Patriotic Party and EC officials of involvement in clashes at Banda duing the registration exercise and called for their arrest and prosecution.
“While Akufo-Addo closed our borders and was using the military and his vigilante groups to prevent eligible Ghanaians from registering, the NPP Parliamentary Candidate and executives in the Banda constituency were busily colluding with the EC officials to register foreigners who have no place on our register.”
“Our (NDC) vigilant agents spotted the Ivorians who came in a truck with an Ivorian registrant number and tried to stop them from registering but they were advised to rather challenge them to avoid any violence. We are therefore calling for the immediate arrest and prosecution of the known persons involved in it.”
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I’m Deborah Aba Narkoah. I’m an avid reader, writer and public speaker.
