The Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga Central constituency, Isaac Adongo has called for an extension of the Limited Voter Registration exercise currently ongoing in the country by a week.

The exercise which commenced on June 17, 2019 would end today Sunday, July 7, 2019.

With little less than 24-hours for the registration to come to an end, checks by MyNewsGh.com at the Bolgatanga Municipal Office of the Electoral Commission which is a registration centre revealed long and winding queues as at Saturday, July 6, 2019.

Some of the prospective voters expressed worry they might not be able to get registered before the end of the exercise.

Checks at a registration centre in Agosi, a community in Sumbrungu, a suburb of Bolgatanga revealed a backlog of over 150 people who were yet to get their names in the register as at 4pm though the exercise ends in that community today.

Isaac Adongo who was seen monitoring the registration exercise expressed disappointment at the turn of events and cited poor planning as a cause of the huge backlog of unregistered persons as the Commission races against time.

“We have had backlog from several of the stations we have been and up to this point. While clearly the EC knew that they need to register close to 1,500 between today and tomorrow and when we are talking today we mean from 3pm today till the whole of tomorrow. They admit that they need to do per kit an average of about 500 people in order to clear that backlog. They [EC] know that from today that they need 5,000 man minutes and that doesn’t exist between today and tomorrow” he said.

According to him, poor planning coupled with inadequate logistics are the major cause of the situation which is likely to disenfranchise many young people from registering and exercising their right to vote.



“The planning itself was wrong. The premise of the estimate of numbers was wrong. The estimate of how many people you are likely to register then informs the deployment of staff and logistics. Once EC started on the premise that they were going to register seven hundred thousand people when the last registration which was just about three four years ago when we did about 1.2 million. So clearly you have shaved off 500,000 people from just the previous one. We know that in terms of population demography these numbers grow” he added.

He questioned why the EC planned to register only 700,000 people when the Ghana statistical service had projected that over 1.7 million would be qualified to register.

He called on the EC to extend the exercise by a week which must also be accompanied with more deployment of resources to clear the backlog.

“I think that the EC should do the right thing by extending this registration exercise by a week. It must also make sure it deploys more resources to the field and it must make sure that every single Ghanaian that is willing and available to register is given the opportunity to register otherwise that would be a mockery of democracy”, he observed.