EC On The Spot Over Inflated Number Of Voters

The Electoral Commission is  on the spot again, this time over the discrepancies in the National Voter’s Register.

This is after the commission yesterday uploaded a fresh voter register on its website after an online whistle blower raised the red flag showing 20,000 ghost voters in the earlier list.

Ms Evelyn Namara, a local social activist revealed that the election body had in the earlier list claimed that there are 8, 027,803 female voters and 7,249,394 male voters but the total number of voters was inflated by 20,000. The commission published a total of 15,297,197 instead of 15,277,197.

In her statistical analysis, Ms Namara noted that the 20,000 ghost voters had been spread throughout the different polling stations.

This has drawn fierce criticism from various stakeholders with the Citizens Coalition for Electoral Democracy tasking the electoral commission to ensure transparency and reassure the electorate that indeed it is ready to conduct the February 18^th poll.

The compilation of the voters register to be used in the forthcoming elections has been shrouded in too much controversy; starting from how and who generated the data that was used to generate the current register, questions around the legal framework that guided the process of extracting the voters register from the national ID registry as well as issues around how the old register was retired.

The electoral commission spokesperson Mr.Jotham Taremwa acknowledges the change in the document but maintains that the information is still the same.

Story By Catherine Ageno

Written by Reporter