Manual verification process will not be wholesale – EC Director

Mr John Appiah-Baffour, the Eastern Regional Deputy Director of the Electoral Commission (EC), has said the manual verification process would not be done on a wholesale process.

He said the manual verification was to ensure that people who were eligible and had gone through the biometric verification were admitted to the manual verification in the event that their fingers were rejected by the Biometric Verification Device (BVD).

Speaking at a two-day sensitisation workshop for female parliamentary candidates in the Eastern Region, Mr Appiah-Baffour said the EC was alert and had all the logistics to conduct any procedure required by the election to ensure that only eligible voters cast their vote.

The workshop was organised by the EC with funding from the European Union (EU) to educate women candidates on the C.I 94 as key stakeholders in the upcoming election.

Mr Appiah-Baffour, who was reacting to concerns of some of the women parliamentary candidates on the safety of the manual verification, said one could only be admitted for manual verification at the final stage where the BVD had not recognized any of the fingers.

He said apart from the election management body, all others including the party agents were observers.

He said as observers the agents only had to notify the appropriate authorities on issues to be addressed and not take the law into their own hands to create confusion at the polling stations.

The Deputy Director urged the women candidates to rally their fellow women and sensitise them on the need to vote to support them because “once all women go out to vote we are convinced that majority of Ghanaians have exercise their civic responsibility”.

Source: GNA