EC to brief Parliament on bloated voters’ register

The Electoral Commission will next week brief Parliament at a closed meeting on the alleged bloated voters registers in the Ashanti Region as well as other programmes for the 2008 election, Abraham Ossei-Aidooh, Majority Leader, has announced.

He said the EC had earlier been invited to brief the House on the alleged bloated register but the invitation could not be honoured.

Mr Ossei-Aidooh, who is also Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Chairman of the Business Committee of Parliament, stated this yesterday on the floor of the House when he presented the business statement for next week.

Mr Hackman Owusu-Agyemang (NPP-New Juaben North), last week raised the issue on the floor of the House on the need for the EC to brief Parliament on the registers and its programmes and activities towards the 2008 general election.

The presidential candidate of the NDC, Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, at a political platform first alleged that the voters register in 10 constituencies in the Ashanti Region was bloated, generating debate in the public.

Later upon an official request from the NDC in the early part of this year, the EC provided it with a CD-ROM which contained the voters registers and after scrutiny of the data the NDC raised the alarm, alleging it had discovered that the figures for the region had been bloated by 113 percent between 2004 and 2006.

The figures, which were made available to the press by the EC, showed that the number of registered voters increased from 1,892,639 in 2004 to 2,005,875 in 2006, representing an increase of six percent.

The EC expressed surprise at the astronomical increases the NDC claimed to have discovered, saying those figures were not correct and it subsequently provided it with "authentic figures".

A committee, comprising political party representatives, the EC and some IT experts, was later commissioned to investigate how the NDC got the alleged bloated figures on the register. It is yet to come out with its findings.