NEC releases new voter’s listing

Barely five days to the holding of the December 26 run-off presidential election between the governing Unity Party and the opposition Coalition for Democratic Change, the National Elections Commission has released the new Final Registration Roll (voters’ listing) for the runoff poll.

Addressing a news conference on Wednesday, December 20, at the NEC headquarters in Monrovia, Chairman Cllr. Jerome George Korkoya says, “With the foregoing, the new Final Registration Roll is now 2,183,268, arrived at as follows: former Final Registration Roll (pre-cleanup) 2,183,629, removal from de-duplication process 274, deletion from records of shared voter Identification Cards 87, total deductions from FRR 361, new FRR (2,183,629 – 361) totals 2,183,268 qualified voters for the run-off.”

Commenting on voters carrying multiple Identification Cards, Korkoya notes that the commission recalls that 998 voters were flagged as sharing multiple Identification Cards.

“Further analysis of these voters show that 158 of the 998 were received without having to issue new voter identification cards, but 87 of them had to be deleted from the roll because their Optical Map Reader forms were scanned twice – which resulted in the multiplicity of the voter identification cards were created for 420 records; so that all the 840 records now have distinct Voter Identification Cards.

It may be recalled that the Supreme Court of Liberia recently ruled that the Final Registration Roll be cleaned up before the conduct of the run-off election.In an effort to ensuring that the mandate is implemented, on Friday, December 15, 2017, technical teams from the National Elections Commission and the regional body ECOWAS invited political parties to abreast them with the Roadmap on the full implementation of the high court’s mandate.

The occasion, which saw many parties in attendance, including the two parties in the runoff, CDC and UP, was graced by National and International Observers and the members of the press. The new FFR is being posted at various polling places across Liberia, ahead of the runoff, as mandated by the Supreme Court.

By E. J. Nathaniel Daygbor -Editing by Jonathan Browne