New voters registration will commence in April - EC

The Commission says the new register will be used to conduct the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections.

Speaking to Accra based Starr FM, the Director of Electoral Services, Dr Serebour Quaicoe said the intended registration will take a month to end.

“We want to start by mid-April and by the end of May we would have finished,” he told Regina Borle Bortey on Shaping The Nation show Monday.

On the claim by the National Identification Authority that it is willing to hand over its data to the EC, he reacted: “We have a challenge with their data, we are targeting over 10million people but they have about 7 million so we don’t know when the will be ready. And besides, we have to attach a polling station to all those numbers”.

Meanwhile, the main opposition NDC and other parties against the compilation of new voters register by the Electoral Commission ahead of the December Presidential and parliamentary elections are demonstrating in Kumasi in the Ashanti region today.

The first protest to challenge plans of the new register was held at Tamale in the Northern region.

The group insist a new register is a waste of taxpayers money and could also create tension since the election is close.

Ghana elections ece-auto-gen

The electoral commission, however, insists they will go ahead and create the register despite the disagreement by the parties and civil society organisations.

Last week, a coalition of major Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and key individuals under the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC) in a statement collectively rejected the decision of the Electoral Commission (EC) to compile a new voters’ register ahead of this year’s general elections.

The coalition, numbering about eighteen (18) CSOs are the latest to join several groups to criticize the EC’s plan to introduce a new voter management system for the upcoming elections.