Central Region fully prepared for Biometric registration

The Central Regional Director of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs Philomena Edusei on Friday said the Commission was fully prepared for the smooth take off of the Biometric voter registration exercise in the region.

She said the Region was allocated 536 digital registration kits with 11 standby kits for the exercise scheduled for March 24 to May 4, 2012.

Mrs Edusei who made this known in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Cape coast, said the Region had been grouped into 536 clusters to be commensurate with the number of kits.

She said a total of 3,301 officials including supervisors and technicians had been trained for the exercise and was hopeful that with the kind of training acquired, they would be able to stand the test of time.

Mrs Edusei said, her outfit had also embarked on community education on how the exercise would be conducted and that it was advisable for people to register at polling centres they would be voting. She added that the exercise would last for 10 days at each polling center and that everyone would be captured within the period.

She said averagely ,the kit could register more than 100 people in a day and that all things being equal in 10 days more than 500 people would have been registered, stressing that, this kind of arrangement would do away with long queues and people having to wait for long hours before they are registered.

She said the exercise will always begin at 6.00 am and end at 6.00 pm each day, and noted that this would give enough time for all, including government workers who normally closed at 5.00 pm to also register after work. She advised that any person who visited a polling centre to find a long queue could go home and return on a day that there would be no queue.

The Regional Director, advised that only qualified and eligible voters should register, stressing "It does not matter which political party the person belongs to or supports; if he or she is not qualified to register they should not be allowed to register".

She said the registration exercise was meant for only Ghanaians resident in the country who were 18 years and above and are of sound mind.**