The Electoral Commission (EC) says there are still minors and foreigners on the new voters’ register.

This was made known by the Chairperson of the Commission, Madam Jean Mensa at a press conference on Wednesday, August 12, 2020.

“The Commission is mindful of the infiltration of foreigners at a number of our registration centres. Additionally, we are aware that a number of minors have also found their way into the register,” Ms Mensa said.

The influx of foreigners on the old register was one of the many reasons proponents of the new register gave.

Jean Mensa announced that 16,963,306 persons had been registered onto the new voters’ register.

She said there were provisional figures pending processes of deduplication and adjudication.

It includes the 30,814 persons registered during the two-day mop-up registration exercise over the weekend.

37,762 persons challenged during registration exercise 

Meanwhile, she also disclosed that over 35,000 applicants challenged in the process.

The Oti Region topped the chart, followed by the Ahafo and Volta regions.

Giving statistics on the number of challenged applicants, Mrs. Mensa said, “At the end of the exercise, the number of challenging cases amounted to 37,762 cases. This represents 0.20% of the total register. From the data, one can observe that the Oti Region had the highest number of challenged cases per population with 0.51% of the registrations being challenged. This is followed by the Ahafo Region where 0.38% of registrations were challenged and then the Volta Region with 0.37% being challenged.”

She further indicated that the challenged cases might be linked to the incidence of non-Ghanaians illegally registering for the voter ID card as most of these happened in border towns in the country.

“It is evident that most of the challenged cases were from border regions with the exception of Ahafo and it gives reason to assume that the challenged cases relate to citizenship issues emanating from the infiltration of foreigners.”