A section of members of the EC Adjudication Committee
The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Jean Mensa, yesterday inaugurated a Voter Registration Adjudication Committee to augment its 2020 voter register review process at the national level to ensure a very authentic register for the conduct of the general election.
The committee is made up of representatives of political parties, selected members of civil society and EC’s employees from the Information Technology and Electoral Services Departments.
Inaugurating the committee, the EC chairperson said the committee would be tasked to review double registrations and impersonation cases with respect to bio-data of applicants who would be found guilty of such offences if the IT department found it difficult to resolve those cases.
She said the challenge process is the primary means to help remove the names of ineligible applicants from the register while during the exhibition exercise, ineligible applicants who have been able to register could also be challenged by registered voters.
According to her, all these challenges would be reviewed by the District Registration Review Committees.
She said the next stage of removing the names of ineligible applicants, that is, foreigners, underage and prospective voters who did double registration would be done by the IT department using its installed data system.
She explained that if the IT is unable to establish those differences, the cases would be handled by the Adjudication Committee at the national level to make a final determination.
The EC, she added, had put in place such mechanism to remove all ineligible voters from the voter register to ensure clean and credible elections.
She said the EC had already exceeded its target of 15 million voter population and is expecting to have an overall voter population of 16.5 million at the end of the registration exercise today, adding that the cleaning of the register would bring the figure down a bit.
She, therefore, called on the political parties to cooperate with the EC to put in place a very credible voter register for a successful, credible and transparent election.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr