We're 'thinking about' new voter roll; 'lots' of dead people on it – EC Chair

The Electoral Commission of Ghana is considering putting together a new voter roll, its Chairperson Jean Mensa has said.

Mrs Mensa said all the Commissioners of the election management body are yet to take a decision on that.

According to her, the new register consideration is borne out of the possibility that many voters may have died between now and the last time the register was cleaned up.

Ahead of the Ayawaso by-election on Thursday, 31 January 2019, the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) accused the EC of bloating the register by 1,000 names.

The EC has described the allegation as untrue.

In her attempt to explain the rationale behind the NDC’s allegation on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS), on Thursday, Mrs Mensa told host Benjamin Akakpo that: “What you have in 2016 is the main register, special voter list, proxy list and the transfer list."

"So, for the Ayawaso by-election, what we did was; because you don’t have special voters and proxy and transfer list, we put together the entire list to form one main list and this is what we have presented to the NDC and to the other parties.”

The EC boss said the Commission has provided the NDC with the special voters' list, the proxy list and the transfer list as well, “so, I believe that once they tally it, they will see that the numbers are not out of proportion.”

She continued: “This is the main issue about the register and it provides us with the opportunity to, perhaps, in the future, put together a new register. We are thinking about it as a Commission but the full Commission is yet to take a decision about it."

"But these are concerns and we know that you have a lot of people who are deceased on the list and when you have these exhibition processes, you don’t find the relatives and families of those people coming to present us with information to extract their names from the list. So, indeed, we do have a number of deceased people on the list and it’s something that we will look at.”