NPP DAMNS EC

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Wednesday April 13, 2016

The NPP has given what it calls its ‘considered opinion’ on the Electoral Commission (EC’s) attempt to audit the biometric voters register damning the commission for its feet-dragging regarding the issue of validation.

“We consider the whole talk about people being disenfranchised if validation is made mandatory as a red herring, a statement issued in Accra and signed by Martin Adjei Mensah Korsah, the party’s Director of Elections said.

“The EC compiled a new register in 2012. Automatically those who failed to show up but had their names on the previous register were not able to vote in 2012. But, nothing stopped them from getting their names back on the register for subsequent elections. Voting is a right but it is not compulsory,” the NPP man said.

He said “it is important we keep the records of registered voters up to date and credible otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of one-man-one-vote. Even for registration there is an administrative cut off point, where after a period even if your name is on the register but not in time to go through the process of exhibition, etc., you will lose the opportunity to vote in that given election.”

According to Mr. Korsah, the commission “has shown with the way that it intends to undertake this exhibition process with validation machines in all polling stations” to undertake verification or validation or authentication but added “what is left is for it to make it mandatory so that it can truly serve as a proper and necessary auditing process.”

He said that “the NPP finds it as very unfortunate that, in spite of all the known inadequacies associated with the way it has been doing things, the EC still wants to repeat the same discredited processes in 2016.”

He said the EC in opting for auditing of the register “it has ignored recommendations from its own consultant on how best to do an audit and has even refused to share the recommendations of the consultant with the NPP, despite public assurances to that effect.”

He said the latest consensus is that the current register contains more names than the total number of people eligible to register to vote in Ghana and asked that if that was the case “why should the Charlotte-Osei-led EC be towing the same line as her predecessor?”

Mr. Korsah said that the independent expert used by the EC, the former ICT Director of Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IBEC), Mr. DismasOng’ondi, went before the VCRAC Crabbe’s five-member committee at the EC office on November 17, 2015, and said, Ghana “must find means of addressing the underlying issues of bloated register” and that “In Kenya the auditing process was completed within a period of three (3) months and if that is exactly what the EC may consider, it should not wait any longer,” but his advice appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

He said the NPP found ‘most odd’ the attempt by the EC to use what it called “the discredited challenge procedure available at the exhibition stage of the provisional register of voters and hopes that a credible register will emerge in the end.”

“How does the EC then reconcile this unyielding faith in the exhibition process with its own admission in its response to the NPP on December 30, 2015, that, as compared to other African countries, Ghana has a far larger percentage of its population on the register because, processes for challenging registration of prospective voters in other jurisdictions are more effective?" adding “why does the EC insist on using a process itself considers to be ineffective to effect the provision of a clean register?”

The NPP Director of Elections asked when the EC intend to write to all government agencies to furnish the commission with the names and details of deceased persons from 2012 adding “we also seek clarification on what the EC means by that the names of the deceased will be removed ‘upon confirmation’.”

“Does that mean that if nobody comes forward at the exhibition centre to confirm death, the evidence of the official death certificate from the Births & Registry will not be enough to have such names removed?” he queried further.

He also said that the EC “appears to have finally come round to the reality that the register for 2016 cannot contain names that got on the list using NHIS cards,” and said the commission in its response to the NPP, “is now saying it is of the view that ‘prior to the invalidation of their registration,’ it would ‘be fair and proper for all such persons to also be heard’.”