EC starts voter register exhibition exercise today

The Electoral Commission has declared its readiness for the eight-day voters’ register exhibition exercise commencing today, September 18, 2020.

The exercise will take place simultaneously across all 33, 367 centres nationwide from 7 am to 6 pm daily, including Saturday and Sunday.

At a press briefing on Thursday, September 17, 2020, the Electoral Commission said it has recruited and deployed over 73,000 officials including COVID-19 ambassadors, to oversee the exercise.

Chairperson of the Commission, Jean Mensa, underscored the need for all registered voters to fully participate in the exercise.

“If for nothing at all, the verification of a person’s details is important as it affords each voter the opportunity to check whether his or her name is on the register. It helps them check their details as captured on the register and gives them the opportunity to amend mistakes.”

Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission has, in a curious twist of events, announced that voters who check their registration details via the mobile short messaging service will have to pay a service charge of 30 pesewas.

Officials of the Commission had at an earlier event said the service would be free of charge for voters who will access it from Friday.

But the Chairperson of the Commission said subscribers would have to pay an inbuilt service charge to cater for the set up with the mobile network operators.

The register has over 16.9 million voters with over 30,000 voters delineated onto an exception list.

It is however still not clear how many registrations have been successfully challenged.

The 8-day exercise will thus afford registered voters the opportunity to match their details against what has been captured on the register.