Prof. John EvansAtta Mills has led his National Democratic Congress in discrediting the Electoral Commission with the allegation that the EC had conspired with the ruling party to bloat the voters' register in the stronghold of the New Patriotic Party, the Ashanti Region.However, a seven-member committee set up to investigate the sources of the discrepancies in the 13 constituencies, has found that the CD-ROMs given to the NDC by the EC "did not contain" any "abnormal increases."It was recommended that "in order not to raise unnecessary tension in the body politic, all stakeholders must be encouraged to give the Commission the first opportunity to clarify issues they are in doubt with in the electoral process."In December 2006 the NDC received hard copies from the EC containing summaries for the constituencies. Analysis carried out by the NDC showed that in the 13 Ashanti constituencies the voter population had increased by over 100 per cent in the two year period of2004¬2006. Very abnormal increases.The committee’s findings hold that the high numbers could be explained by human error, as there was a high repetition of names and pictures of persons in the same register, and with ID numbers shared by other voters. Indeed, the conclusions are that there "were discrepancies in the voters' register figures given out by the Commission to the NDC and the GCPP on soft copies. The discrepancies were as a result of errors which occurred in programs used to generate the voters' statistics. "The committee found that the EC was not aware of the error or discrepancies before the NDC brought its attention to it. Also, "the current voters' register suite of programmes deployed in the Commission has been in use since the early 1990s hence the present voter population growth cannot be handled by a system that was put in place to handle far less voter population figure."There was no finding of a 'bloated register', but that there was insufficient coordination between the IT and various departments of the EC, with the Director of IT failing to "recognise the magnitude of the problem caused by the discrepancies." Though the NDC maintained that both CD-ROM and hard copies obtained from the EC indicated bloated figures, the committee found that "there were discrepancies between the compact register on the CD-ROMs and the hard copy summaries in respect of the 13 constituencies in the Ashanti Region and abnormal decreases in three constituencies in Eastern Region over a period of two years."It has been recommended that the EC "as a matter of urgency should use the upcoming revision exercise to clean its voters data base."Source: The Statesman