The head of the EC explains how some names were omitted from the register of new voters

General news for Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

2020-09-29

The president of the Electoral Commission (EC), Jean Mensa, has explained how some names were omitted from the current voter registry.

The names missing from the recently compiled electoral roll prompted the opposition Democratic National Congress (NDC) to raise a fierce protest against the EC.

In an address delivered on Monday, September 28, 2020, the EC chief said that a process to export the information of registered voters to secure storage is to blame for the names missing from the registry.

“Voter registration is done through biometric registration devices at the polling stations. The data is then transmitted to the data center where it undergoes the deduplication process by the Automatic Biometric Identification System (ABIS).

In other words, the data is exported for safe storage and further analysis. Then the provisional registration occurs. In some cases, the process of exporting data from USB sticks to the central server was faulty, leading to a data shortage in some areas.

“It is important to note that although the registration process is IT driven, there is still a significant amount of human involvement that can result in errors at every step of the process, from registration to display. In summary, due to unintentional human and administrative errors, the process of exporting data from BVD kits to USB sticks and then to the Central Database was flawed in some cases, leading to deficiencies in some areas. Simply put, our technology performed optimally as expected, yet in some areas our human element fell short, causing some of the data gaps that we experienced, ”he explained.

NDC presidential candidate John Dramani Mahama has cited missing names reported at some polling stations as part of a grand EC plan to disenfranchise some eligible voters in the upcoming December 7, 2020 election.

He said at a press conference recently that his party will not accept the results of a flawed election.

Addressing the media why he believes there is a deliberate attempt to remove some names from the registry, John Mahama noted that the NDC has always exercised restraint throughout the process despite anomalies.

“But let me reiterate again that we will not accept the results of a flawed election. We will certainly not look at, or shirk our civil liability and allow the EC, either through malice or sheer incompetence, to usurp the mandate of the people on December 7 , polls, “he said.

The Election Commission, he suggested, should take immediate steps to rectify and sanitize the registry and re-display it to allow the voting public to verify their details in the voter registry before it is finalized.