PAYNESVILLE, Montserrado – Amid complaints of incompetence, the National Elections Commission staff assigned to Kendeja High School and Rehab Center no. 30307 have issued a voter’s card without a name on it.

Abel Reeves, a 22-year-old who is a first-time voter, told The Bush Chicken that he was disappointed after he realized that his voter card did not carry his name. The name space on the card remains completely blank.

Reeves said he had gone to register on Wednesday and told the voter registration staff that he was not educated and did not know how to spell his name. Although he is a 12th-grade student, he said his action was to confirm rumors that many of the NEC staff do not spell.

“I called my name, and the registrar asked me to wait and he would process my card after I told him I couldn’t spell my own name,” he said. “I did not notice that my name was left out on the card until I went home and my friends identified that my card had a problem.”

Abel Reeves received a nameless voter registration card. Photo: Gbatemah Senah

Thomas Suah, the registrar at the center, admitted to the situation but attributed it to an oversight. He denied claims that he did not know how to spell the name of the voter.

“It was just an oversight because we have all his information with us. Even on his counter form and his Optimist Mark Recognition form, we got all his information,” he said.

He said the error is the first at the center, adding that it can be corrected by a change of the card if the voter returns to the center before the close of the exercise.

When asked about a situation where the voter affected does not return before the end of the registration process, Suah said a correction could be made during voters’ roll exhibition.

NEC voter registration supervisor for Montserrado’s sixth district, Ruth Kenneh, also said that the situation was an oversight.

“You have thousands of people. You register them, you make mistakes. So the only thing we can do is make sure that we are appealing to him to come back during the exhibition and the mistake will be corrected,” Kenneh said.

She blamed the error on the crowdedness of voter registration centers but promised to get back to her staff to ensure that a similar mistake is not repeated.

When asked about mechanisms to detect people who would attempt to register more than once, she said they were working with pens and papers and not computers, a situation she said makes detecting voter fraud difficult. She said such insincere people would be identified when the database was compiled in the computerized system.

The minimal security put into place right now, she said, is the marking of fingers of registered voters with invisible ink. However, although the voter registration process lasts for more than a month, the ink last for a maximum of two weeks.

This means that people can be registered more than once without being caught if the security is not improved.

Since the kick-off of the voter registration exercise on Feb. 1, there have been continuous complaints from citizens in the counties about how NEC and its staff are conducting the activities.

All centers visited by our reporter in Montserrado and Margibi have no immigration officers. In some places, NEC staff were denied access to facilities to conduct the registration due to poor arrangements on the part of the commission.

Featured photo by Gbatemah Senah