EC Starts Biometric Register Exhibition Today

Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan - EC Chairman

The Electoral Commission (EC), today begins a nationwide exhibition of the biometric voters register to allow an estimated 13 million registered voters to verify their names, photographs and other personal details.

The provisional register include 476 prisoners who will be taking part in a general election for the first time in the history of the country in the exercise of their fundamental human rights.

The 10-day exercise is scheduled to take place at 23,000 polling stations across the country between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. daily, ending on September 10, 2012.

It is a constitutional requirement aimed at cleaning up the register of the dead, the under-aged, multiple registrations, foreigners and other anomalies that may be detected in order to protect the integrity of the electoral roll.

The acting Director of Public Affairs of the EC, Mr Christian Owusu-Parry, said the exhibition of the register would not be done in phases unlike the registration exercise and, therefore, urged registered voters to avail themselves of the opportunity to check their names.

He said if one was issued with a voter’s identity card after registration, one still needed to check one’s name because if for any reason the name was not in the register, the affected person would not be allowed to vote on election day.

The EC undertook a nationwide biometric voters registration exercise from March 24, 2012 to May 5, 2012, in line with its commitment to replace the manual voters register, which had 12.5 million voters on roll as of the last general election in December, 2008.

Mr Owusu-Parry said the objective of the exhibition exercise was to allow all those who registered to go and check the correctness of their particulars in the register.

He said registered voters whose names were not found in the register could ask for an inclusion of their names upon showing their ID cards as proof of registration.

Mr Owusu-Parry said minor corrections, such as wrong spelling of name and wrong age, could be made at the exhibition centre but the major corrections involving photographs, fingerprints and inclusion of names, for instance, could only be made at the district office of the EC.

He appealed to the general public to help remove the names of deceased persons from the register by providing information to expunge those names.

He said if anybody had proof of persons who were not eligible to register by reason of age or nationality, but managed to do so, he or she could file an objection against such persons.

The person who files the objection and the one against whom the objection is filed will subsequently appear before a Registration Review Officer who will investigate the matter and take a decision thereafter.

Meanwhile, the National Catholic Secretariat (NCS) has urged all eligible Ghanaian voters who registered during the biometric voter registration exercise to take advantage of the display of the Biometric Register to verify their names and addresses in the register.

A statement signed by the Secretary-General of the NCS, Very Rev. Fr. Nicholas Afriyie, reminded eligible Ghanaian voters that “this exercise will also provide an opportunity of knowing for certain where the respective polling stations of voters will be on the day of the upcoming December elections”.

“It is the duty and right of every qualified Ghanaian citizen who has registered to vote to exercise this right when the time comes for elections but the exercise of this right can be complicated when there is confusion over names, addresses and other data at the time of voting,” it stressed.