December Elections Unlikely, GHC 400 million Wasted, Voters Disenfranchised

After blowing a whopping GHC 400 million on the  new voters register that was considered unnecessary, the Electoral Commission (EC) says it will conduct another round of voter registration exercise that threatens to derail the December 2020 general elections and has essentially criminally disenfranchised millions of eligible Ghanaian voters.

This was the conclusion from the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting today, Thursday, September 24, 2020, where the EC was confronted with the fact that its ongoing voters’ register exhibition has revealed millions of names mysteriously omitted from the register which was compiled less than three months ago.

However, any register compiled now could be an illegal register as it is not likely to meet the mandatory 60 day grace period for a register to be compiled before the general elections.

The National Democratic Congress’ Director of IT,  Kwame Osei Agyeman-Griffiths argued that aside, the timeline problems associated with the re-compilation of the voters’ register, the EC will have to exhibit the register once more, leading to an impossible juggle to make the register valid for the December 7, general elections.

The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) Campaign Manager Peter Mac Manu appears to admit that whatever new names are compiled in the register once more, would be ineligible to vote at the polls in December.

At the IPAC meeting, the Jean Mensah-led EC admitted its monumental failure and has promised that it will conduct a remake of the registration exercise to capture who were duly issued voter ID cards less than three months ago but whose names are strangely missing from the register under exhibition.

It is unclear where the EC will get additional funds from to conduct the patchwork on the supposedly superior new voters’ register after the Akufo Addo administration and the EC had arm-twisted Parliament to approve more than GHC 400 million to undertake a new register that thrashed the then-existing register.

The EC had argued against all criticisms, that the previous register had no issues, especially since it was the same register that the EC had used to conduct the 2016 general elections and three major elections afterwards, from 2017 to 2019. But Jean Mensah and her lieutenants at the EC had argued that the then-register was compromised with minors and foreigners, and that the proposed new register will eliminate all of those problems with “superior” facial recognition and biometric systems.

This argument turned out to be a scam because less than a week after the new register was compiled, the EC itself admitted that the new register contained minors, foreigners and countless duplicates. In a rather unprecedented attempt to resolve the problem, the EC inaugurated a committee which it claims will manually correct the serious anomalies in the supposedly superior register.

A few days ago, Whatsup News gathered from EC insiders that that millions of voters data captured in the new register have been corrupted on the EC’s system.

The informants explained that at its current state, the register cannot be used for the December 2020 general elections. The situation was so serious that the Flagbearer and running mate of the NDC, John Dramani Mahama and Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang had to cut their campaign tour short to tackle the mess caused by the Jean Mensah-led EC.

The EC started it the scheduled voter exhibition on September 18,2020, for registered voters to confirm their details in the register, however, hundreds of thousands of voters who were duly registered a few months ago, discovered that their names have been cut out of the register.

Incidentally, these deletions appeared to have been predominant at the strongholds of the main opposition party.

The mess reportedly started when the EC attempted to transfer voter data onto its system. It was discovered that most of the data have been corrupted and irretrievable.

 Apparently, during the just-concluded new voters registration exercise, EC officials had been instructed to do offline registration on the Biometric Voters Register machines (BVR) with intent to transfer data into the EC’s system later.

However, when the time came for the transfer to be effected, the EC’s technicians realized that a lot of the data that had been captured offline had somehow been corrupted and made irretrievable.

In one Polling station, for instance, 2000 voters were registered, but 100 names were retrieved from the data transfer. This means that if nothing is done, over 1,800 people who registered at the centre will not be able to vote during the elections.

Critics however, believe that the EC was attempting to use the register to rig the elections in favour of the governing party by padding the numbers in its political stronghold while deliberately deleting names of voters in the political strongholds of the opposition party.

With the desperate attempt to recompile the register, it appears the EC’s reported plan had backfired.