Insufficient education slowing down voter registration exercise
A registration officer has partially attributed the congestion at the various biometric voter registration centres to insufficient education by the Electoral Commission (EC) and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) on the process.
Ms Adelaide Opei-Kumi, Registration Officer at the Amanfrom Metropolitan Assembly Primary School Polling Centre, said the information on the process did not go down well with the communities because most people did not know that the exercise was in phases and would last for 40 days.
Consequently, many prospective voters, who believed they had to register in the first 10 days, had been rushing to be registered at centres that were not designated for their specific areas.
Ms Opei-Kumi, who made the observation in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, (GNA) on Monday said, the mad rush, apart from giving them extra work, was also slowing down the process and advised the public to wait for their turn as scheduled.
The Electoral Commission started a nationwide Biometric Voter Registration Exercise on Saturday to give Ghana’s democracy a further boost by ensuring a more credible voter register with its allied benefits for the December polls and beyond.
The first phase, which started on March 24, would end on April 2. The second phase would continue from April 4 to13 with the third phase from April 15to 24 while the final phase would run from April 26 to May 5.
It is expected to capture the data of about 12 million potential electorates.
According to the EC, four polling stations have been combined to form a cluster of registration points and has advised all Ghanaians of 18 years and above with sound mind to take advantage of the opportunity to register.
The EC has trained about 42,000 temporal personnel to operate the 7,000 Digital Registration Kit for the exercise. In addition to the temporal registration officials, EC personnel, Commission members, agents of political parties and the media are monitoring the process to inject vigilance.
Source: GNA