The Executive Director for the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) says the greatest achievement from compiling the new voters’ register was the cleaning of 'ghost' names.

According to Dr Emmanuel Akwetey, the country over the years has not invested in such a procedure.

This, Dr Akwettey believes, has contributed to the bloated nature of the voters' register.

"We have already known since 2012 that we do not clean up our register. The greatest success of this exercise for me is that we have cleaned up the dead. It is a very expensive way," he stated.

He, however, believes the issue of bloating has not been entirely solved since busing of people including minors was one of the biggest problems raised during the exercise.

“The high incidence of bussing itself then undermines the integrity. Part of the problem we are trying to solve by saying let’s have a whole new register because it is bloated, the minors contribute to that too.”

Speaking on Newsfile, Dr. Akwettey said, there are some structural things including identifying a minor or a foreigner, a dead person, and others that a new register cannot solve.

“So what we thought should be done is that if we had used only the national ID which everybody must have and we didn’t, we were not ready to compile new voters register with higher integrity than we have had previously.”

Contributing to the show, Bright Simons stated that part of the money used to compile the register could have been used to invest in the Births and Deaths registry to create a system that could feed the EC with data on who minors and foreigners are.

He stated that it could have also helped the EC clean names of the dead from the register.

Having names of dead persons or minors he said, will continue "because they do not invest in the fundamentals."