The Electoral Commission is considering opening the voters register all-year round to enable potential and eligible voters who are of age to register. Albert Arhin, Director of Elections at the Commission, who disclosed this to the Times yesterday, said this will help reduce the backlog of eligible voters. He was giving clarification to an issue which he raised on Wednesday at a training of trainers programme organised by the Christian Council of Ghana for members of the Local Council of Churches. It was attended by about 50 participants and is aimed at equipping the participants with the tools to train others as observers during the December poll. Mr Arhin described the just ended registration exercise as "terrible". He explained that the logistics problems that the EC faced was due to the overwhelming numbers of people who queued to register. "Our estimate was to cover at most one million people but we ended up having to contend with another one million people that we did not budget for," Mr Arhin said. He said it was observed that most of the people who joined the queues had misplaced their voter I.D. cards and flouted the rules by going to register again. Mr Arhin suggested that it should be necessary in future to ask voters to pay a token fee for the cards so that they learn to take good care of them. He blamed political parties for misleading their supporters to do the wrong thing. He recounted an incident in the Upper East Region where 200 people were bussed to go and register and after thorough investigations, only 19 were genuinely qualified to register. Mr Arhin expressed the fear that many multiple registrations might have been done out of ignorance in the just-ended registration exercise. The Director of Public Education of the National Commission on Civic Education, Kwaku Baa Owusu, speaking on "Sovereign will of the people and Election 2008", said "it is observed that majority of the citizenry, virtually do nothing politically until the next round of election and campaigns come up in another four years." He emphasised the need for citizens not to allow themselves to be influenced or bought by money or other material inducements when going to vote. "It is important for citizens to note that once they sell their conscience for monetary or other rewards and vote in a manner that is against their own conscience, they effectively forfeit their right to sovereign will or forego their rights to complain if things do not go well and deny themselves the moral right to put government to task," he added. Source: Times