By Ragan M. Conteh
Although the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) has published voters’ data by polling centre and station, there is still mixed feelings from the opposition that what they required was not what the ECSL eventually published.
The Public Election Act states that the ECSL must publish the revised voter register; a list of names, identification numbers, dates and places of birth.
The information voters demand publication of by polling station analysis is not complaint with section 13 of the Public Election Act of 2022.
The Public Election Act states that, “There shall be a national register of voters to be as the register which shall be the names of and particulars of persons entitled to vote in public elections, referenda, including voters’ identification numbers, dates and places of birth, sex and signature or thumbprint”.
The opposition has stated that, the publication of the voter register data by centres and polling stations is not enough, but that the names, dates of birth and places of registered voters with their identification numbers must be published.
They have accused the ECSL of playing tricks, for which they said the opposition APC will resist any attempt to move the 2023 elections from being free, fair and transparent.
It could be recalled that the APC through their national secretary general, Lansana Dumbuya, recently called on the relevant institutions including the international community to urge the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone to publish the voter register for the consumption of all and sundry.
The APC said ‘procrastination is the thief of time’, adding that the ECSL wanted to procrastinate with the publication of the voter register.
The party has demanded that the ECSL should assure due diligence, integrity and fairness in the conduct of the 24 June elections in Sierra Leone.
The APC party has also noted with utter dismay the substandard and mediocre voter identification cards the ECSL issued out to the electorate for the conduct of the 24 June 2023 General Elections.
The party is also cognisant of the fact that, the ECSL is inter alia charged with the responsibility of conducting national elections.
Disappointingly, the procurement process for the voter identification cards was unilaterally and clandestinely done by the commission; political parties were never involved.
According to the party, this shady procurement process explains in part the reason for the production of the worst voter identification cards this country has ever had.
Almost all of the cards produced are in black and white contrary to the coloured photos that were displayed during the Voter Registration Exhibition.
A good number of the cards issued out have smudged photos making it difficult if not impossible to identify the owners. Some of the cards have incorrect gender and /or addresses.
The party said this is a deliberate move by ECSL to refuse qualified voters whose facial photos are unidentifiable from voting on polling day.
In addition to that, the APC’s Information Technology (IT) specialists have inspected the cards and have noticed that the feature on the card purported to be a security feature ‘is just bogus and not a security feature’.
The APC said the voter registration cards are deficit in security features, of which there is none.
Based on the findings of the party’s IT specialists ‘any local internet cafeteria can reproduce those cards or even better quality’.
The conduct of the Voter Verification Registration as observed has created a lopsided playing field that will disenfranchise a certain section of the electorate.
It is evident that the data for thousands of citizens who had registered in this election cycle were incomplete, incorrect or missing from the register. In many of these instances, citizens were not allowed to do the necessary corrections or create a fresh registration.
The omission of some names from the Provisional List of Voters, photo-less registration details, incomplete data, and the lack of transparency, openness, inclusiveness of ECSL in its operations clearly suggested that the integrity of both the voter registration processes had been skewed and has thus compromised the entire electoral process.
The way and manner in which ECSL removed so-called fraudulent entries from the register, including duplicates, was never publicised to allow the public and political parties in particular to scrutinise the lists and make official objections to entries they consider either fraudulent or duplicate.
Providing electoral stakeholders’ access to scrutinise the voter lists would satisfy the electorate and political parties that the identity documents provided by the ECSL are legitimate.
The APC said the voter cards should be regularised, system sanitised, and political parties be allowed to audit the system in order to know how many cards were produced, the securitised measures taken, and the names and appropriate addresses of the owners of the cards produced, be published.
The All Peoples’ Congress, having highlighted the many concerns to be addressed in the next few days, wants to put the ECSL on notice that if the ECSL fails to address these issues within the time stated, ‘the party will exercise its constitutional right to call for a nationwide peaceful protest to demonstrate its dissatisfaction’.