The Electoral Commission says it has successfully retrieved the names of "valid electorate" that it initially failed to capture into the provisional register that was recently compiled.

Addressing the media on Monday, Jean Mensah, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, indicated that the register has since been updated electronically with the data that was retrieved.

“We have successfully retrieved and continue to retrieve valid applicants who were missing from the provisional register. We have updated the electronic register with the missing data," she said.

Thus, the EC Chair implied that the alleged 7,000 and counting applicants whose names were alleged to have been deliberately removed from the register, “are on the electronic register”.

The updated register which reflected the inclusion of the missing name, Jean Mensa noted, were sent to the exhibition centres before the end of the exhibition.

She said, “In the case of Ashaiman, we have a deficit of 165 persons and we are expecting that these persons will come through the register through the process of inclusion.”

Background

Ernest Henry Norgbey, the NDC MP for Ashaiman, had earlier alleged that the names of some 21,000 prospective voters including his had been omitted from his constituency’s register.

He said, “We have identified over 21,000 names that have been deleted from the register and it is just unfortunate that this has happened. We had a very peaceful registration in Ashaiman. There was no chaos. There was nothing untoward and at the end of the exercise, everything was smooth.”

He continued: “So it shouldn’t be that during the exhibition, our names will not be on the register, including myself, the MP of the constituency. It’s just unfortunate that this is happening. Be that as it may, it also appears that it’s a deliberate attempt by the EC to remove certain categories of people from the register because if you look at the number of people from both the Volta Region and the Northern Region that have been deleted, it could be a deliberate attempt."

But the EC refuted the claims that it had deliberately removed the names of some persons from the voters’ register.

The commission insisted that voters who duly registered and were issued with Voter ID Cards but cannot find their names on the provisional register can rectify the situation using the voter exhibition exercise.