Offenders Won't Have Names In Electoral Roll For Five Years- Afari-Gyan

Any prospective voter who registers more than once will never have his name in the electoral roll for five years, after it has been detected. Additionally, the offender will have his or her name deleted from the roll and be prosecuted and sentenced to a fine, a jail term or both. The Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, made the announcement during an interaction with the Council of Women Traditional Leaders in Ghana as part of the EC�s biometric voters� registration education campaign in Accra. He noted that unlike the manual voters� register where only the photographs of the voters were compared manually, the biometric register compared the fingerprints of all the voters to check for double registration. He said to check whether it was possible to easily identify people who register more than once, he asked his driver to register more than once at two different registration centres during the pilot registration. When he came to Accra, the national data centre had detected that his driver had registered more than once. Dr Afari-Gyan said in the Volta Region, a member of a political party was also given an opportunity to register again at the same registration centre, where he first registered and when he put his hand on the scanner, the machine indicated that he could not be registered because that was his second time. He gave an instance with the old manual registration in the Pru Constituency where children below the ages of 10 years were able to register. When he showed some of the pictures of these obvious minors to some ambassadors who visited the commission, they asked �whether those children were carried on their mothers� back to those places� because they were too young to get to the registration centres on their own. He made a passionate appeal to the queens to educate the people about the need to be extra vigilant to ensure that those who were not Ghanaians as well as minors did not get their names in the roll because although the biometric machine was very effective, there was no way it could detect minors or non Ghanaians. Dr Afari-Gyan appealed to Ghanaians living on the border towns in the country to be extra vigilant because detecting non-Ghanaians would depend on those who lived in the area. He cautioned that although it was within the right of every registered Ghanaian to challenge the age or nationality of any prospective voter, this should be done within the law, explaining that it would be against the law to use force to prevent such people from registering. According to him, the right thing to do is to report to the EC officials if one has strong conviction, backed by evidence, that somebody is not a Ghanaian or is below 18 years. With this, the challenger will be given a form to fill while the challenged will be registered alright but will not be given a voter identity card. He said the case would be determined by a district review committee made up of the highest police officer, highest education officer, representative of all the active political parties and a representative of the traditional ruler. If the committee is not able settle the issue, it will be taken to a law court.