Voters Register Exhibition Starts On Low Key

The usually long queues at voters registration centres and on elections days were missing when the nationwide exhibition of the voters� register started yesterday. During a visit to some of the polling stations in the Accra metropolis in the late afternoon yesterday, very few people were seen checking their details while some centres were virtually empty, reports, Salomey Appiah & Charles Andoh. Exhibition officers sat idle while they waited for potential voters to call at the centres to cross-check their identification details. Although some of the electoral officers said participation was very poor, others also declined to speak on record, saying that they had been given orders by the Electoral Commission (EC) not to disclose any information to anybody, except with permission from the EC. At the Nayak Polling Centre at Adabraka for instance, only nine out of the 578 prospective voters had turned up for the exercise as of 3 p.m.. Also at the Additrom polling station, only four out of the 440 potential voters who were registered had turned up to check their details at the time of the visit. At the Fire Protection Centre, one person was observed standing by the officer to check his details. But according to the official, who declined to give her name, about 30 people had turned up to check their details. Bolgatanga Exhibition officers in the Bolgatanga Municipality have made a passionate appeal to media practitioners and other stakeholders in the region to help whip up public interest in the ongoing voters exhibition exercise, reports Vincent Amenuveve. They pointed out that inadequate education on the exercise accounted for the poor patronage on the first day. As of 12 noon no one had for instance come to check his or her name in the voters register at the Plaza exhibition centre. The exhibition officer, Mr Alex Bizoola, told the Daily Graphic that there was the need to increase awareness to make the exercise successful. Wa The voters register exhibition hardly attracted people in Wa in the Upper West Region as the seven-day exercise opened yesterday, reports Michael Quaye. As of 12 noon yesterday, just a total of 25 persons had taken the trouble to crosscheck their names and details in the voters register, with officers emphasising an apparent low publicity for the exercise as the reason. At the Circuit Court Polling Station, just five persons had gone through the process as of 10:50 a.m., while the Central Prisons Polling Station and the Tendamba Junior High School Polling Station had recorded zero each by 11 a.m. and 11:25 a.m. respectively. The centres at St Andrews Junior High School and Nayiri Anglican Polling Stations had recorded 10 and 15 people each as of 11:10 a.m. and 11:35 a.m. respectively. Kumasi The Ashanti Regional Director of the EC, Mr Paul Boateng, has urged organised groups, churches, corporate entities and family members to encourage their registered relatives to check their details in the voters register during the seven-day exhibition exercise, reports Donald Ato Dapatem. He advised that they should also use the opportunity to help remove the names of their deceased relatives and make the necessary corrections to their details which were captured before the 2012 elections and during the recent limited registration. Mr Boateng, who was speaking to the Daily Graphic in Kumasi on the first day of the exhibition of the voters register, expressed the hope that more people would take advantage and assist the EC to perfect the register for the forthcoming district level elections and subsequent elections. At the AME Zion JHS Lower at Asafo in Kumasi the officer at the centre, Mr Augustine Antwi, told the Daily Graphic that out of the 2,200 who registered during the limited registration, only 14 had checked their names as of 1 p.m. He was hopeful that the numbers would increase as time moved on. The story was not different from the AME Zion JHS Upper at Asafo where only three persons out of 210 registered voters had cross-checked their names as of 1.20 p.m. The voters exhibition exercise began in the Northern Region on a low key yesterday, reports Samuel Duodu. Conspicuously missing were the long queues that usually formed during registration exercises and on election days at some of the exhibition centres visited in the Tamale metropolis as of 2 p.m. on the first day of the exercise. As of 1.13 p.m. both the Queen Elizabeth Nursery A and B exhibition centres at Tishegu had not seen any prospective voter checking their names. The Exhibition Officer for the Queen Elizabeth Nursery A centre, Mr Tindanzo Abanikpama, in an interview said the exercise started at 7am and as of the time of the visit, a total of 65 people had come to check their names on the two registers, 64 people for the 2012 and one for the 2014 provisional voters register.