The Chief Electoral Commissioner, Dr Christiana Thorpe, last Friday announced that official campaign period would start on July 10 and end August 9.
She also announced that on July 2-6 all completed parliamentary candidature nominations forms and objections should be submitted to NEC and on July 3-7 all completed presidential candidature nomination forms should be received by the Commission.
The NEC chairperson disclosed that the Tactile Ballot Guide would be used in the forthcoming elections to enable the blind exercise their franchise.
Dr Thorpe pointed out that the Commission had also noted the glaring gaps in the knowledge base of two other categories of people with disabilities such as women living with disabilities which, she noted, had been by-passed by civic and voters’ education and the Hearing Impaired that the oral culture of communication whether from person to person, through the radio and TV or even using the Town criers had left the voters with hearing impairment completely uninformed.
She stated that NEC would therefore be inviting all organizations, NGOs involved in disability issues and other interested civil society groups, to a consultative session early in July to brainstorm on how they could undertake the critically needed Voters’ Education exercise to support efforts to address these gaps and bring all eligible voters with disabilities on board.
Dr Thorpe also announced that the Exhibition and Enquiry Exercise held on May 21-25 was successful.
She pointed out that, “the success is unprecedented as it has never happened anywhere in the world where 5% of the voter registrants turned up to check on their details.” She also
informed that 29 objections were upheld and those names would not be included on the final voters’ register.
The NEC chairperson stopped short in giving the final amount of voters which would appear on the verified voters’ register because, according to her, the data people were still working on the register.
She however stated that there would be no significant shift from the 2,618,110 voters already in the provisional register.
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