The Electoral Commission (EC) has discovered over 24,000 cases of multiple registration of voters in the recently held limited voter registration exercise.
This follows the EC’s review of the entire process, a month after the registration exercise ended.
The limited registration exercise was conducted to offer Ghanaians who have attained 18 years since the last registration exercise, as well as those who have never registered before to do so.
Confirming the latest development on Eyewitness News, the Director of Electoral Services at the EC, Dr Serebour Quaicoe said the discovery was made by a team from the EC, political parties and civil society groups.
“In the course of the registration, we were complaining of some people engaging in the multiple registration. So as at now, we are working on those multiple registration. There is a committee made up of officials at the EC, representatives of the political parties and some civil society organizations. We are still investigating and as at now, we have close to 24,000 people who have engaged in double registration. Some of them registered in 2012, 2016 and 2019. It means whenever we open for registration, they register.”What it means is that the person registered more than once either at the same polling station or a different station.”
Punitive actions
Dr. Quaicoe also mentioned that once the Electoral Commission is done with the full list of multiple registrants, details of such persons will be dispatched to the various centres across the country for the appropriate action to be taken.
“What we are doing now is that we are looking at the issue because some of them can be pardoned because they are the same centres with the same code because our officers at those centres were not vigilant. But some of them registered at different centres with different registration details. These people were identified with the thumbprint and the system exposed them.”
“All these names have been quarantined once they appeared as multiple registrants meaning that, their names will not be in the voters’ register. After we are done with the compilation, we will paste the list at the various centres”, he noted.
2019 limited voters registration
The Electoral Commission had said a total of about 1.2 million new voters were registered under the limited voter registration exercise.
Out of that number, the registration of 8,500 new voters were challenged.
The NDC had prior to the exercise rebuked the EC for attempting to limit the exercise to only the commission’s district office.
The commission subsequently expanded the centres to cover additional centres following pressure from the NDC.
A total of 1,573 electoral areas have been designated nationwide to cater for persons who were located at hard-to-reach areas.
The commission used a Voter Management System and Biometric Voter Registration Machines to register prospective voters.
Some centres recorded network challenges that stalled the process and sparked some confusion.