The Electoral Commission (EC) has rejected calls for the publication of the list of 30,000 people it claimed it had deleted from the new voters’ register for unknown infractions.
Countless civil society groups, political parties and constitutional bodies like the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), have called for the list of disenfranchised Ghanaians but all the calls have fallen on deaf ears of the EC, which strangely insists that the affected persons know themselves.
The Director of Elections at the Electoral Commission (EC) Dr Serebour Quarcoo in an interview with Citi News said, “…If you registered more than once, you know you have more than one ID card, you yourself know you have registered more than once and I shouldn’t tell you. I don’t need to publish your name before you know.”
Last week, the Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education, Josephine Nkrumah said publishing the list public will help avert confusion at polling stations in cases where affected persons arrive at polling centres before realizing they have been excluded from the voting.
But Dr. Quarcoo disagrees. “People thought that once they were not caught at the registration centre, they have succeeded in getting away with it… They are in the register, but they are inactive and on the day of the elections, when the list goes to the polling stations, your name will appear but if you registered three times, the attire you wore at all the three centres will come,” he indicated.
However, the EC may be stoking massive confusion on Election Day because the same EC had earlier admitted that some names had mistakenly been deleted off its system, forcing it to hold a second round of registration several weeks after the main voters’ registration exercise had ended.
Also, the EC boss Jean Mensah admitted last week that some people whose registration may turn out problematic would be run through manual verification system.
These dilly-dallying narrative of the EC is already getting people uneasy about the prospect of violence erupting during the election because it is apparent that not everybody whose name had been deleted would be aware of that fact.
The other side of the argument is that the EC may be deceiving Ghanaians by claiming 30,000 names had been deleted when in fact it intends to smuggle in some names into the voters register.
There has been widespread reports that the EC had secretly printed tens of thousands of dud voters ID cards intended to use to rig the elections for the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).
The Electoral Commission in October indicated that it has deleted some 30,000 names from the voters’ register.
The affected persons reportedly multiple registrations or were challenged and not cleared by the various district review committees, however, there is no evidence to proof the veracity of this claim by the EC.