The Electoral Commission (EC) has said the call by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for an independent forensic audit of the voters register was "misguided" and "premature".
The Commission itself is an independent body and besides, the public exhibition of the provisional voters register (PVR) was part of the process to identify and correct errors, mistakes or discrepancies if any exists in the register, the EC has said.
It said the discrepancies the NDC has talked about and had a meeting with EC over it, were not "new" as the Commission itself had detected same issues and has taken steps to resolve them.
It said the law provides remedies for such discrepancies to be corrected under the Constitutional Instrument for registration of voters, C.I. 91, which has been updated by C.I. 126, and that the law envisaged that discrepancies may arise following a registration exercise and therefore provided remedies for fixing them.
Such remedies the commission said includes, including omitted names, objection to names of unqualified voters, removal of names of deceased persons from the register, replacement of poor quality or damaged voter ID cards, correction to wrong spelling of names, correction to wrong registration centre codes and misplaced polling stations and amendment to other registration details, example age, sex etc as a result of clerical error.
The commission said this at a media engagement on Thursday evening [September 12, 2024] dubbed, "Let the Citizens know" where the commission addressed the nation on matters arising from the exhibition of the provisional voters register.
Speaking on behalf of the Commission, Mr Samuel Tettey, Deputy Commissioner in charge of Operations said the planned street protest by the NDC was not the way to resolve the issue.
According to him, the EC has asked the NDC multiple times to provide data on the discrepancies it said it had found so the EC can compare it to what it has also found as part of the public exhibition process and was already working on resolving it, but the NDC has not done so.
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