BY: Aminata Sameena Sesay
The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) is in the process of developing a Web Platform and mobile phone SMS connection for registered voters through which they can verify their details captured in the countrywide voter registration exercise that ended in October.
The commission in a press release dated the 30th November, 2022 stated it has acknowledged the concerns from registrants relating to omission of names, photo- less registration details and incomplete data in certain centres, that have affected some of them .
The commission stated that all registrant details were saved and that re-extraction of data from the Voter Registration Kits (VVK) has been completed in seven affected districts.
It’s also stated from 531,758 newly captured registrants, 50,000 had no accompanying photo, and the commission says it is earnestly working with the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) to address those problems.
ECSL Director of Operations,Mohamed Turay explained to Politico about the duplicated registration of people ,an error he linked to the many details captured by NCRA that were lost in the VVK.
He said they had to instruct their workers to re-capture them and such cases, he pointed out, hold no criminal offence, unlike the underage cases where some people used different information to claim eligibility for the 2023 elections, an act that he said is criminal. Those cases have been reported to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Police, he stated.
Turay said that they also made it clear before verification that ECSL does not have the legal mandate to change names, except NCRA and that the commission had used data from the Authority for both the registration and verification processes and that it is the legal right for the Authority to provide data for the commission.
It’s also been confirmed by ECSL that a two- day inquiry process will be conducted from 4th-5th December 2022 within the various Wards across the country to allow those who got rejected, objected or omitted to make a plea. An exhibition of the Voters List ended a few days ago.
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