All hands on deck to clean voters register
Cleaning the voters register is a shared collective action and every registered voter must be interested in checking his or her name in the register during the exhibition which commences on Monday, July 18 to Sunday, August 7, 2016.
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As an important national exercise in the electoral process, the exhibition of the voters register offers all registered voters the opportunity to check their names and particulars.
It is also an opportunity to ensure that names of the dead, minors and double registrations are removed for the attainment of a credible register.
The EC has an additional responsibility of ensuring that ‘NHIS voters’ whose names have been removed, but are qualified are also given the opportunity from Monday to re-register.
Indeed, all Ghanaians have roles and responsibilities towards ensuring a successful election on November 7, 2016, and one of such responsibilities is to make the voter exhibition exercise a success.
The voters register can only be made clean and accurate if everyone who is a registered voter patronises its exhibition.
Political parties and other key stakeholders, including the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), also have a responsibility to help clean the register by encouraging their members and the general public to patronise the exercise.
The Daily Graphic reminds all and sundry that registration centres remain restricted and are security areas and that only registrants and those with accreditation are permitted at the centres during the exercise.
In preparation for a successful exhibition, it is the hope of the Daily Graphic that the EC has completed the training of staff in all 10 regions to equip them with the needed knowledge to have a better understanding of the process, and what is required of them for the smooth take-off and completion of the exercise.
Attendance at exhibition centres in the past had been slow because most voters probably were not aware of the start of the exercise.
The EC, therefore, needs to step up its mass educational campaign to encourage many more people to go and crosscheck their details in the register.
A vibrant publicity campaign will go a long way to ensure that the exercise is successful and patronage is high.
The government last week announced that it was meeting the financial obligation of the EC, and the commission itself continued to assure the nation of its readiness to prosecute the 2016 polls in a free, fair and transparent manner.
Let us go out there to check our names during the exhibition period and thereby help make the register credible and to also enable us to exercise our franchise on voting day on November 7.
