We don’t need to publish names of ‘banned’ 2020 voters – EC

The Electoral Commission (EC) has rejected calls from the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to publish the names of 2020 voters it had deleted from the country’s voters’ register for the December 7 general elections.

At least 30,000 names had been expunged from Ghana’s electoral register, according to the EC. The affected persons were said to have engaged in multiple registrations or were challenged and not cleared by the various district review committees.

They would, therefore, not be able to take part in the December 7 polls and further barred from registering as voters for a while.

Commenting on the calls of the EC to publish those names the Director of Elections at the Dr. Serebour Quarcoo observed that the EC will not oblige to the request.

“…If you registered more than once, you know you have more than one ID card, you yourself you know you have registered more than once and I shouldn’t tell you. I don’t need to publish your name before you know,” he told Accra-based Citi FM.

Meanwhile, the EC is deploying seventy-four thousand, eight hundred brand new biometric verification devices to be used in the conduct of the December 7 polls.

Briefing Parliament on the elections management body’s preparedness for the upcoming polls on Saturday, November 7, 2020, Jean Mensah hoped that the new devices will “enhance the integrity and credibility of the polls”.

“It is expected that the enhanced features of the devices will speed up the verification process and go a long way to ensure that only persons whose biometric details are captured in our system vote on the Election Day,” Mensah said.