NPP makes case for new voters register
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has called for the compilation of a new voters register to replace the existing one, saying that there is overwhelming evidence that the current register is seriously flawed and bloated.
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According to the party, investigations conducted by a team pointed to the fact that there could not be free, fair, transparent and credible elections in the country with the old register.
Addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, the running mate to the 2016 presidential candidate of the NPP, said the investigative team was put together by the party to unravel the mystery behind the unusually high and statistically questionable voter population of 14 million, representing 56 per cent of the total population.
He alleged that the names of tens of thousands of foreigners were found on the country’s electoral roll.
Smoking gun
In what he described as the “smoking gun”, Dr Bawumia said the team set out to compare Ghana’s voters register with those of neighbouring countries and the results were astonishingly alarming.
According to him, with copies of Togo’s voters register and that of Ghana, the team used biometric facial recognition technology and found potential matches of 76,286 names on both registers.
“These voters used the same names, have the same facial and other features on the voters registers of both countries,” he said, adding, “This is just a sample; it is quite a lot as you will see and it is quite amazing.”
He said that discovery was made using less than 10 per cent of the names that had been scrutinised with the technology available.
Dr Bawumia said a large number of those names were found to have been captured using still photographs.
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That, he said, was found to be strange because during the biometric registration process, voters were expected to have their photographs taken during the exercise.
Yet the NPP’s team, he alleged, found that the images of some voters were photographs taken from documents.
“These were pictures clipped to documents and shot for purposes of registration. Most of the pictures were pictures scanned into the register. If you take a digital picture, you cannot staple it, but clearly most of the pictures were stapled,” he said.
He said that had encouraged the investigating team to procure the voters registers of Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso for similar scrutiny.
Jig-saw puzzle
He said the Electoral Commission (EC) was using different voters registers to conduct elections in the country — one with 13.6 million and the other with 14.1 million voters, out of a total population of 22 million people then, which was statistically wrong with world standards.
Dr Bawumia said that was not internationally acceptable, pointing out that the former Chairman of the EC, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, and President John Dramani Mahama, when he was the Vice-President, had both come out to complain, calling for concerted efforts to address the anomaly.
He said the EC sought to explain that the difference in the two registers was due to overseas registered voters who numbered only 705 voters for the 2012 presidential election.
He said another jig-saw puzzle was the registration of vulnerable people for the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in the build-up to the 2012 elections in constituencies and districts bordering neighbouring countries.
He said the registration was done in the Volta and Brong Ahafo regions where the voter population shot up to more than 50 per cent, questioning what activities could have caused people to migrate to those regions and constituencies.
He explained that even though Sekondi-Takoradi had experienced an oil boom, the voter population in the twin city was on the decline.
Limited registration
Dr Bawumia said, for example, that during the limited registration, the Volta and the Brong Ahafo regions alone took over 40 per cent of new voters, representing 403,000 voters out of the total 905,000 registered nationwide during the special registration.
He said until the Supreme Court came out with the verdict that the NHIS card was not proof to qualify someone to register as a voter, a lot of people had used it to register as voters, as statistics available suggested that a broad section of people had used it to register as voters, and that such names needed to be expunged, as the NHIS card could be accessed by foreigners.
He said the increase in voter population between elections was very high, saying between 2008 and 2012 the increase was about 40 per cent.
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In a six-point recommendation for reforms, Dr Bawumia said the new register should be compiled simultaneously in two weeks in all the polling stations across the country
He said the new register should be audited by a reputable organisation to make sure that it was flawless.
The register, he said, should be made available to all political parties participating in the 2016 elections 90 days before the elections to allow the parties to study it.
He said the government, as part of the recommendations, should resource the National Identification Authority (NIA), where the biodata of every Ghanaian could be stored to prevent future occurrences of minors and foreigners breaking the electoral laws of the country.
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National chairman
Earlier, the National Chairman of the NPP, Mr Paul Afoko, had said the presentation of the evidence was significant, since it was another innovation the party was bringing to bear on the electoral system of the country.
He said the NPP was of the view that elections in the country should not be a period of drawing swords at one another but a period for people to express their will freely without fear or favour.
Flag bearer
The presidential candidate of the party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, had earlier said if President Mahama, as the ECOWAS Chairman, had prevailed on Togo to reschedule its general election because the opposition had cried foul over the voters register, it should not be difficult for him to introduce the same reforms in Ghana to ensure peaceful and credible elections in 2016.