EC sets June 30 for new voters register compilation but there is trouble!

The EC has set June 30 for new voters register compilation to commence. This was made known in a letter dated June 8, sighted by electionsinghana.com social media.

According to the EC, the registration will take place at all registration centres and district offices of the Electoral Commission throughout the country.

The question is has the new C.I being gazetted? If yes when? it will take 21 days for it to mature and if this was done at the Assembly press today the 9th, then it will mature on 30th June however, the EC can not start the registration on the day it matures. It would have been prudent that 1st July is set as the registration day.

Trust me, several political parties will likely speak on this soon. Starting the new voters’ registration on June 30th if the C.I was gazetted today will amount to trying to subvert the law.

According to the regional director of the EC for Accra as published in the 3rd June edition of the Daily Graphic, it takes 20 minutes to complete one voter registration and sometimes one hour to register three persons.

The EC officials will spend 10 hours a day at each registration center for six (6) days for the exercise. Most polling stations have an average of 800 registered voters. 

This means all things held constant one complete set of Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits will register if 20 minutes per applicant (5 per hour x 10 hours x 6 days). This gives us 300 in six days.

A registration center must have a minimum of 4 machines with backups to be able to take care of the numbers and the pressure that comes with the process.

That gives us an approximated number of (300 per machine x 4 machines) =1200 applicants.

8000 such machines have been ordered by the EC for the 28,992 polling stations. If each polling station will be provided a minimum of two (2) that will be (28,992  x 2) = 57984 of Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits but we are expecting only 8000 units. Your guess is as good as mine, however, the EC has decided to in its wisdom to use the cluster system of 6 polling stations per registration center. This means many Ghanaians will have to converge at one polling center from 6 different polling stations to do the registration.

let us analyze this as well. If each station has just 500 voters on the current register, that will still give us give us (500  voters x 6 polling stations = 3000 voters and they will require a total of 3000/300 per machine for the six days. This gives us 10 machines.

In this case, the electoral commission requires 4832 clusters thus 28,992/6 per cluster. In all the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits needed will be (10 per cluster x 4832) = 48320 but we have just 8000 kits unless the EC decides to register in batches thus complete one region and then move to another. Do you see big trouble ahead per this analysis?

Source: Isaac  Kwakye | Elections in Ghana