Two missing Voter registers finally located

The provisional biometric voters roll for Afrancho and Hemang near Ankaase in the Kwabre West Constituency, which went missing have finally been traced.

The registers were traced after seven days into the exhibition exercise, which is meant to clean up the register.

Mr. Ampratwum Oppong, the Exhibition Officer at the Afrancho Methodist Centre, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that about 200 people had already checked their names and other data there.

There are a total of 613 registered voters at that centre.

Mr. Joshua Ofori-Prempeh, the District Electoral Officer, confirmed to the GNA that the register for Hemang, where 515 people registered, had also been dispatched to the place.

The 10-day exhibition officially ends today, September 10, but he could not tell whether the exercise would be extended in the two Centres to make up for the lost days.

Mr. Ofori-Prempeh said the decision rests entirely with the Electoral Commission (EC).

The 1,127 voters in the two centres, in effect would have had just three days to verify their details in the provisional register should the EC decide against any extension.

Meanwhile the response to the exercise in some exhibition centres visited by the GNA was generally not encouraging.

The records showed that only about half of the number of registered voters turned up to check their names.

At the Ntiribuoho Centre, 832 voters, out of the 1,208 had been there to check whether their personal data had been correctly captured.

Five hundred and eighty-one (581) out of the 1,331 voters at the Abura Printing Press Centre in Kumasi had done same.

At the Adum Railways Police Station, 1,148 out of the 2,591 registered voters had checked their names.

The situation was not any different at the Oforikrom Primary School Centre, where out of the 1,645 registered voters, 834 had shown up as at midday on the last day of the exhibition.

The exhibition officers said the verification of one’s data on the provisional register through the use of cellular phone text message might have also accounted for the situation where many chose not to be physically present at the centers.