Mr Mubarak Seid, the Sunyani East Parliamentary Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has described the Electoral Commission (EC)’s on-going limited voter’s registration exercise as stressful for applicants and potential voters.
He expressed the fear the registration exercise would be unable to capture many of the applicants as anticipated, if the EC failed to tackle the technical and emerging challenges proactively.
The EC must therefore be proactive enough, heed to countless advice from the election stakeholders, and tackle the challenges confronting the exercise, he said.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Sunyani, Mr Seid observed that the stressful nature of the registration exercise at the centres would discourage many of the potential voters from registering.
“I was at Atuahenekrom. My brother, visit and see for yourself the kind of stress applicants are going through. There is no shade there and I even provided the applicants benches to sit. This situation is unacceptable and the EC must do something,” the parliamentary candidate indicated.
Mr Seid said though he was satisfied with the peaceful nature of the registration exercise in the constituency, yet the EC would have done better and spared the applicants if they had created more registration centers at the polling station level or electoral area level.
The NDC parliamentary candidate said it was not too late for the EC to reconsider and create more centres, and that would position them well to capture the thousands of eligible Senior High School applicants.
“The current situation whereby political parties have no option than to bus eligible applicants to the registration centres is not the best because if that continued it would not augur well for democracy,” Mr Seid stated.
Comparatively notwithstanding, Mr Seid said the registration exercise had seen some improvements, hoping that the EC would heed advice from election stakeholders and put in interventions for more applicants to register.
He expressed appreciation to the election stakeholders for their commitment and support towards the registration exercise nationwide, and urged all eligible voters who had not registered to do so to be able to vote for the NDC in the Election 2024.
That, Mr Seid added, would enable the NDC to win the election by a wider margin, regain political power and bring improvements to the socio-economic livelihoods of the ordinary citizenry in particular.
