Voter registration exercise: EC mops-up Saturday, Sunday

The Electoral Commission (EC) has announced a two-day mop-up registration exercise for eligible Ghanaians who will not be able to register in the mass registration of voters which ends today.

The mop-up exercise will be undertaken at the various district offices of the EC across the country on Saturday, August 8 and Sunday, August 9.

The acting Director of Public Affairs of the EC, Mrs Sylvia Annoh, who made this known to the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, said the decision to do a mop-up after the main registration was to ensure that no eligible applicant was left out of the national exercise.

Mop-up

During the sixth edition of the Let the Citizens Know series held on July 27, the Chairperson of the EC, Mrs Jean Mensa, indicated that the commission would do a mop-up exercise at selected areas on need basis.

She had said the exercise would not be a blanket one because some registration centres had lower population of registrants.

The EC chairperson had also stated that the commission would rely on information from its field officers in deciding on centres that would benefit from the mop-up exercise.

New decision

However, Mrs Annoh stated that the number of eligible applicants who presented themselves to be registered at the various registration centres had gone down drastically in the last phase of the exercise across the country.

“We have studied the situation and seen that most of the queues at the registration centres have diminished. In some of the centres, our officers sit the whole day and register only 12 persons,” she said.

The EC Public Affairs director urged eligible applicants who were not able to register during the mass registration exercise to take advantage of the mop-up and register in order to be captured on the voters register.

Responding to a question on how the registration would be done at the district offices, she said applicants would be assigned to polling stations of their choice within the constituency.