Policy Think Tank, Danquah Institute has called on the Electoral Commission (EC) to put on hold the planned registration exercise until the election management body set measures in place to validate the current register “riddled with flaws”.
At a press conference addressed by the Executive Director of the Institute, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, it impressed upon the Commission to heed to the proposal from its own panel of experts and implement the option of validation as a credible and viable means of giving Ghanaians a clean register.
He was amused as to how the register will be improved when it [EC] had decided to shelve the validation exercise that is supposed to correct the anomalies in the base document.
The Electoral Commission constituted a panel last year to probe matters concerning the bloated nature of the 2012 register of voters which at the end submitted its recommendations.
The Report of the Panel, at Page 14 says: ‘Further analysis of data, based on the reported number registered in 2012 and 2014, shows 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… This constitutes about 4 per cent of the eligible voters on the register… On the one hand, the margin is almost twice the margin by which most presidential elections were won and more than ten times the margin in the preceding elections… Broadly considered, this is too wide a margin to entertain, for several reasons.’
“Looking at all the options available to the country, validation appears to be the most viable way to achieve a credible register in Ghana for 2016, without spending hundreds of millions of dollars which the country does not have.
Per the validation process all those who want to remain on the register will be required to report to a registration centre (their polling station) during a certain limited period to be validated, as recommended by the Panel in its report.
