General News of Friday, 17 July 2020

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

Voters register: EC has not bloated registration numbers - Jean Mensa assures

Jean Mensa is EC boss play videoJean Mensa is EC boss

The Electoral Commission has insisted that it does not bloat and has not inflated numbers of registered voters as speculated in some reportage.

Chairperson of the EC, Jean Mensa, said her outfit is committed to ensuring integrity and transparency thus speculations that the EC has bloated figures of registrants are unfounded and must be disregarded.

According to her, the Commission by way of deepening transparency has ensured that print outs of the day’s statistics are given to all political party agents, on a daily basis, to conduct their own tabulation.

“I want to emphasize that this is not so. At the level of every registration centre, they print out statistics of the number of registrants per day and that is a high level of transparency. This straight out is given to all the stakeholders (political parties). This enables them to do their own coalition as well. I believe that if the EC had an intention, not to make these figures avaible, that print out would not be made available.”

Deputy Chair in charge of Corporate Services, Dr. Bossman Eric Asare on his part noted the EC is determined to have a credible and clean register for all citizens.

Addressing the media at a press briefing, he noted “It is very strange that at a time where the Commission has deepened transparency in the entire registration process, some people still accuse the Commission of increasing the number of registered voters in certain regions. The Commission will never be involved in anything like that.”

He explained that what happened at Offinso North and Afigya-Sekyere districts in the Ashanti region are not rare occurrences stressing that the EC has been auditing figures when they come in from the various centres.



He added that the Commission made corrections to the figures in several places as a way of ensuring accurate figures are reported to the general public.

“We even detected what happened in the two districts and corrected them before the NDC started highlighting them.”

Dr Asare said anyone who has issues with the figures should contact the EC for redress.

The compilation of a new voter's register by the Electoral Commission (EC) commenced on June 30, 2020 across all the districts in the country.



The Commission says it has so far captured over 7.2 million eligible citizens in almost three weeks of the registration exercise.

The exercise, which is expected to last for 38 days, is projected to capture the biometric data of about 15 million Ghanaians eligible to vote ahead of the 2020 December 7 general elections.