We want new voters register : NPP insists
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has reiterated its conviction that only a new credible voters register will guarantee free, fair and transparent elections in November this year.
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It has, therefore, called for an immediate stop to all processes involved in the internal cleaning of the register until all parties can satisfy themselves of the modalities and means by which the internal cleaning is being done.
Speaking at a press conference at the party’s headquarters in Accra yesterday, Mr Peter Mac Manu, the Leader of the NPP Campaign Team for Election 2016, stressed that the party remained totally dissatisfied with the response from the Electoral Commission (EC) on the party’s request for a new register.
He stated that contrary to the EC’s strong claims that the Justice Crabbe Panel rejected the call for a new register and suggestions that it had okayed the current one, the panel found that the register was flawed and could not be the basis for any election this y
The panel, he said, also suggested various ways of rectifying the situation.
EC panel confirms
Mr Mac Manu explained that there was now no doubt that the current register was unacceptably bloated.
He said the Justice Crabbe Panel, which the EC itself commissioned and which included a renowned statistician, in its analyses compared three key indicators: the estimated voter population, registered voters and estimated number of deceased registered voters from 2010 to 2016.
He said the panel’s findings were that the number of names on the register was unacceptably more than the total estimate of people eligible to register to vote in Ghana.
The report, according to him, using data from both the EC and the Ghana Statistical Service, was of no doubt that both the 2012 register and the current updated register (2014) were bloated and flawed.
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Statistical improbability
“It makes the case that even if Ghana was able to achieve the statistical improbability of a 100 per cent registration of every eligible Ghanaian, the 2012 register should not have exceeded 13,650,237 names.
“This figure is nearly 14 per cent smaller than the voters’ list used in 2012 and does not take into account those who registered illegally using NHIS cards. Also, this was the register that the EC itself admits now that the IT software was not good enough to undertake any meaningful de-duplication in 2012,” he declared.
“This is not the NPP talking; this is the panel put together by the EC,” Mr Mac Manu explained.
Calculations concluded
The report, he observed, made the calculation and concluded that “further analysis of data, based on the reported number registered in 2012 and 2014, showed that as many as 584,892 estimated number of voter deaths would have occurred cumulatively by the 2016 elections and may well remain in the register of voters”.
He said what the panel did was to isolate, first, the number of the population who were 18 years and above, then reduce it by the number of foreigners, reduce it further by the estimated number of dead people who were eligible to vote to arrive at the total estimate of people eligible to register.
Mr Mac Manu said the NPP completely agreed with the panel’s view that having nearly 600,000 dead people on the 2016 register “is too wide a margin to entertain”.
‘’This constitutes about four per cent of the eligible voters on the register, which, again, in the words of the panel, is “too wide beyond the tolerable limit, given that presidential elections are won by a much narrower margin,” he stated.
He said the members of the panel had expressed concern that the “human factor”, as they put it, could, for example, lead to multiple ballot papers being given to a single voter by an unscrupulous election officer or results changed on paper, either at the polling station or the collation centre.
Cleaning versus registering anew
Mr Mac Manu said the panel report made it absolutely clear that the EC did not have an effective system to restrain ineligible persons, such as minors, foreigners and fraudsters, from being registered.
“And even when these sets of people get on the register, the EC did not have an effective means of getting rid of their names, and again there is also no effective means of removing the names of dead people, as already admitted by the EC,” he added.
He said the panel’s findings made a strong case for what the report termed as “validation”.
Shirking responsibility
He said the EC was shirking its responsibility to keep a credible voters register after it had maintained it could not remove the names of some foreign nationals.
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“This excuse is just like saying that because the police are unable to arrest a thief in one part of the country, the police will be discriminating and acting arbitrarily if they arrest another person in another part of the country,” he added.
While the NPP insists that there are some 76,000 Togolese on Ghana’s voter register who ought to be removed, the EC maintains that Ghana’s laws allow dual citizens the right to vote.
Mr Mac Manu said whether the NPP found a million or 1,000 Togolese on the voters roll, the case was the same — that the register had been compromised and that there was the need for a new one.
He said it was precisely because of that reasoning that the NPP did not ask for a cleaning of the 76,000 but asked for a compilation of a totally new register.
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However, the EC denied that request for a number of reasons, including the fact that the party did not provide any proof of the citizenship status of those persons and did not show any proof that they were not entitled to be registered in Ghana.
The EC also argued that appearance on the register of another country, under the current laws of Ghana, did not take away one’s eligibility to be on the Ghanaian register.
Multiple registrations
Touching on multiple registration, Mr Mac Manu described the EC’s claim that it had identified 200,000 of such cases in the Ashanti Region as strange and impossible.
He said the EC boss’ disclosure was very strange because in the EC’s response to the NPP, it had stated that it had identified 150,000 names nationwide.
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“So how is it possible, therefore, for the EC to identify as many as 200,000 only in Ashanti when she said, in the letter she wrote to us, that the whole Ghana had 150,000 names identified?” he quizzed.
He alleged that the EC’s responses indicated “how the EC chair is quick to jump on the NDC propaganda wagon and be leading it”.
“The NPP is of the view that the EC boss must desist from projecting herself as someone who speaks the same language with the ruling party and rather speak as a neutral and fair manager of Ghana’s electoral process,” Mr Mac Manu stated.
He said the NPP’s recommendation for a new voters register included many of the requirements that had been used in the past to compile voters registers, pointing out that
“we find it very strange that the EC boss would claim that our recommendations will lead to the creation of an elitist register”.
Background
The various political parties have expressed mixed reactions to the decision by the EC to audit the national voters register for the 2016 elections.
While some of them support the decision, others have described it as shameful and stated that it proves that the EC has already taken a stand.
While the ruling NDC is of the view that the decision is the right one, the dominant opposition party, the NPP, thinks otherwise.
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