The Electoral Commission (EC) has disclosed that about 1.2 million new voters have been added to the electoral roll after the recent limited voter registration exercise.
The EC successfully ended its limited voter registration last week, having carried out the exercise over the last four weeks.
The Director of Electoral Services, Dr Serebour Quaicoe, said the commission had initially projected to register about 700,000 but ended up with 1.2million.
According to him, the figure was provisional since the EC was still checking the actual figure with the Voter Management System (VMS).
“But I say it’s a provisional figure because we are now checking on the machine itself, we always have to use pen drive to take the data from the system into the VMS [Voter Management System], so we want to be sure that we have captured everybody who registered… so that we come out with the actual figure,” Dr Quaicoe told Radio Ghana.
“The law states that your name should appear only once on the register but when we started exporting the figures into the database, there is a high rate of multiple registrations.”
On turnout, he explained that the Ashanti Region registered the highest number of new voters (209,810).
The Greater Accra, Eastern and Central regions were also not far behind in terms of number of newly registered voters, he stated.
“This year the challenge system was very very low, maybe we are understanding ourselves because some of the challenges are just flimsy,” Dr Quaicoe said.
“The person will just look at your face and say you are not a Ghanaian, you are under age and the rest. But when they appeared before the committee, we realised that the challenge had no basis.”
