Faulty machines stall registration at Ziope

The printer being used for the biometric voter registration at the Ziope R.C. Church centre in the Adaklu Anyigbe District broke down with smoke emitting from it one hour into the exercise on Saturday morning.

Many of those who had queued to get registered left the centre in frustration.

The computer also recorded the first person to be registered as the tenth (10th) person while the second person was recorded as the 28th person.

These hiccups caused some of those who came to register to doubt the competence of the operator as well as the quality and reliability of the registration machines.

Some Party Agents present were not happy with the breakdown of the machines.

A middle-aged woman told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that she got to the centre at about 0500hours and could therefore not wait for the problem to be fixed.

Another woman also complained that the processes were time consuming.

Mr Victory John Foli, the Registration Officer (R.O), said it took ten minutes for one person to go through the registration process.

The Centre did not have challenge and registration forms.

Madam Laurentia Kpatakpa, Volta Regional Director of the Electoral Commission Thursday told a regional dialogue session on the exercise that there would be stand-by machines to take care of situations such as the one at Ziope.

At the SSNIT Flats registration centre in the Ho Municipality, many of the largely middle-class residents had queued up to get registered by 0700 hours.

However the first person had not completed the processes of registration by 0745 hours.

A Party Agent told the Ghana News Agency that the process was too slow and that the officials undertaking the registration did not seem to have mastered their work.

Another Party Agent was however hopeful that the officials would pick up their acts as the exercise progressed.

Mr Emmanuel Yao Mereku, the Registration Officer said all materials were available except A4 papers for printing out their accounts at the end of the day.

The exercise has been generally orderly at the Registration Centres visited by the GNA in parts of the Ho Municipality and Ziope in the early hours of the exercise.**