EC outdoors 16 member Adjudication Review Committee

Electoral Commission (EC) on Wednesday outdoored a 16-member Adjudication Review Committee (ARC) with the mandate to review and address the case of multiple registrations after the voters' registration.

The ARC, which is chaired by Mr Samuel Tettey, Deputy Chairman in Charge of Operations has members from the Commission, Political Party representatives; and representatives from selected Civil Society Originations.

They, in accordance with Constitutional Instrument 92 would submit the report of the ARC to the Chairperson of the Commission for authentication and approval.

Mrs Jean Mensa, the Chairperson of the EC who inaugurated the Committee in Accra said the ARC was one of the important building blocks towards the compilation of credible, transparent, free, and fair Voters’ Register for the country.

She said, “The Commission is of the firm conviction that a clean register is synonymous with a credible, transparent, fair and peaceful election. The Commission believes that the Voters’ Register is the bedrock on which a credible election is built. It is important, therefore, that the new Voters’ Register bears the hallmark of integrity”.

“As such, we as a Commission are sparing no effort to clean the register so as to guarantee its credibility ahead of the election. Our desire is to ensure that only eligible Ghanaians that are Ghanaians who are 18 years and above and who are of sound mind are found on the Voters Register”.

The Chairperson said over the years, the Commission had developed a number of mechanisms and processes to ensure a clean register and that includes the Challenge System.

She explained that under the challenge system, a qualified voter could challenge the registration of an Applicant for the reason that the Applicant does not meet the eligibility criteria.

The challenging cases, she said were brought before the District Registration Review Committee (DRRC) established by Commission to deal with challenges.

Mrs Mensa said the exhibition stage offered another avenue for a registered applicant to challenge the eligibility of another registered person, of, which the DRRC determines the fellow qualify or not.

“In addition to these two processes, the Commission relies on technology to ensure the credibility of the register. This process is called deduplication. It is carried out without human intervention. The essence of the de-duplication process is to ensure that the Voters’ Register contains only unique individuals,”

She said the on-going voters’ registration exercise was being undertaken offline and that after the exercise the Automatic Biometric Identification System (ABIS) would analyse each Applicant’s biodata and biometric details and match it against every existing record in the database.

“If the ABIS finds that a record already exists in the system, it marks it as a duplicate record, and the rules set by the Commission on dealing with such occurrences apply,” she said.

The mandate, she said was one of the final mechanisms instituted by the Commission to clean the register.

Mr Tettey said under this system the Committee members would be presented with a number of cases, which the system flags to address.

‘When the system is not able to confidently determine whether an applicant’s record is a duplicate or not, the process of manual adjudication is initiated. During the adjudication, operators analyse each matching record and determine whether it is a duplicate or not”.