Voters registration has met expectations – Mahama concedes

Despite initially mounting a strong resistance to the process to compile a new voters register, former President and flagbearer of the opposition NDC, John Dramani Mahama, has admitted that the exercise has been successful.

“I think the exercise met our expectations… [Over 16 million registrants] is within the range that one would have expected,” the National Democratic Congress presidential candidate said Sunday, August 9, 2020, in an interview.

The Facebook Live interview in Kete Krachi in the Krachi West District of the Oti Region is part of activities on his tour of the Region.

Explaining why himself and NDC put up a resistance against the Electoral Commission’s decision to compile a new electoral roll for the December elections, he said usually before a new register is compiled, it is preceded by a national population census which gives an accurate date of the target population.

However, this did not happen this time around because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Initially we had strong objections to compiling a new register. We believe that we could use the old register because by ages of registers it [the old register] was still relatively young and because we had not done the population census, we said that ‘why don’t we use this one and if we do the population census we will have an accurate data and then we could go ahead and do it,’” he explained in the interview hosted by XYZ TV and Woezor TV.

The EC revealed that biometric data of 16,663,669 Ghanaians have been captured in the just ended compilation exercise of a new voters register.

These were the figures provided by the commission as those recorded as at August 6, 2020, ahead of the December 7 polls.

According to the Deputy Chairman of Corporate Services at the EC, Dr Bossman Asare, the nationwide provisional figures since its last briefing have seen the top four regions maintain their positions.

Speaking at the eighth edition of the ‘Let the Citizen Know’ series on Friday, August 7, Dr Asare said; “As at 6th August 2020, the Commission had registered a total of 16,663,669 nationwide. Since the last briefing, the four top regions have maintained their positions. The Greater Accra region has especially lost some grounds in percentage terms from 21.34 % to 20.8% of the total registered. The Ashanti region also reduced marginally by 0.1% to its current 17.9%.”

According to John Mahama, despite the high turnout, the new register has largely succeeded in taking out the names of dead people that existed in the old register.