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The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has urged citizens who have turned 18 years and adults who are yet to register to take advantage of the Limited Voter Registration exercise which commenced yesterday.
“The right to vote starts with the responsibility of registering with the Electoral Commission (EC),” the Vice-President, who is a flag bearer hopeful of the New Patriotic Party, said in a Facebook post.
The exercise is being conducted at all EC’s district offices across the country and would end on October 2, 2023.
Dr Bawumia stressed that the fundamental right to vote begins with the responsibility of registering with the EC and encouraged citizens to actively participate in the process to enable them to vote in the 2024 general election.
He emphasised the significance of civic engagement and the role of voter registration in enabling citizens to exercise their democratic right to vote.
The 21-day exercise is scheduled to end on October 2.
It will start from 8a.m. to 5p.m. each day, including weekends.
The EC has targeted to register at least 1,350,000 persons in the 2023 Voters Registration exercise based on its projection that such a number might have attained 18 years since the last registration exercise in 2020.
It said that since the exercise had not taken place over the last three years for persons who had turned 18 years and above, “we expect the numbers to be huge in the opening few days and hopefully after a week it will normalise.”
The commission which is expected to register an average of 300 people a day in all its district offices urged Ghanaians to take advantage of the programme to exercise their civic responsibility.
The electoral management body held similar exercises in 2016, 2019, 2020 and even in 1996.
The main documents for the registration are the Ghana Card or the Ghanaian Passport.
In the absence of these, two individuals who have already registered could vouch for such persons as guarantors.
Registration will be done online using the District Management System (DMS) as well as offline by way of the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kit.
Copies of daily reports of the registration exercise from the beginning to the end will be given to political party representatives at the various registration centres, while each political party will be allowed to present one representative to observe the exercise.
Despite facing an injunction application from the National Democratic Congress and four other political parties, the EC is proceeding with the exercise.
