Limited voter registration exercise ongoing

The Electoral Commission yesterday began a limited voter registration exercise for first-time voters ahead of the 2024 general election and persons who wish to own voter identification cards for other purposes.

The 21-day exercise will end on May 27, 2024.

Chairperson of the EC Mrs Jean Mensa indicated that the exercise aims at registering approximately 623,000 first-time voters across the country.

“The registration will be from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. And that gives us the figure of 623,000 that we have put there. That is not to say that we cannot go beyond that. We did mention that in 2023, we projected 700,000 people to visit our registration centres,” the EC chairperson pointed out.

Mrs Mensa further said the commission has arranged for all district offices to rent generators in case of power outages, these generators will kick in to ensure continuous voter registration services.

She explained that its offices will switch to an “offline” mode, where voters will be registered manually, and their details will be stored on a pen drive if the generators fail.

“We are trying hard to… we’ve made arrangements to ensure that we don’t have challenges because of dumsor. What we’ve done is to have all our district offices rent generators so that in the event where there’s dumsor, that can kick in.

“However, should there be the unexpected, we would switch on to the offline and by offline it means the voters will be registered and their details will be put on a pen drive that will be copied in our offices when the light returns, so the registration will not be disrupted,” Mrs Mensa explained.