EC: Over 12.75 Million Registered In Biometric Exercise

Unconfirmed reports indicate that the the Electoral Commission (EC) has registered over 12.75 million prospective voters at the end biometric voters registration exercise. The results however excludes the last day of registration for eligible voters for the 2012 elections. According to a source at the EC, with the provisional figure, the EC was on course to achieving its projected target to register 13 million voters. Before the 2008 elections, the number of registered voters on the roll was 12.5 million, of which over nine million exercised their franchise in the elections of that year. Currently, the number of people involved in multiple registration stands at 4,000. The Chairman of the EC, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, had made it explicitly clear before the beginning of the exercise that any prospective voter who registered more than once would not have his name in the electoral roll for five years. Additionally, the offender would have his or her name deleted from the roll, be fined, sentenced to a jail term or both. He made the announcement during an interaction with the Council of Women Traditional Leaders in Ghana as part of the EC�s biometric voters registration educational campaign in Accra. He noted that unlike the manual voters register in which only photographs of voters were compared, the biometric register compared the fingerprints of all voters to check for double registration. Official figures from the electoral commission would be made known by the end of the day.