'EC has used registration exercise to deliberately disenfranchise one million voters' – Asiedu Nketia

The Electoral Commission, by its actions and intentional refusal to listen to good counsel from its stakeholders, has “deliberately disenfranchised one million eligible Ghanaian voters” through the just-ended voter registration exercise, General Secretary of the biggest opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has said.

He told Kwabena Prah Jr in an interview on Accra100.5FM’s morning show Ghana Yensom on Thursday, 13 August 2020 that: “The EC should have used figures from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) regarding the number of people who have attained 18 years and above, to set its target rather than unilaterally setting a target of 15 million for itself while the GSS’ figures showed that 17.8 million people fell within that category”.

“It means, deliberately, you wanted to disenfranchise some people”, Mr Asiedu Nketia said.

In his view, “The EC didn’t listen to good counsel”.

“Now, the EC says it has registered 16.8 million instead of the expected 17.8 million. So, from the get-go, the EC has disenfranchised one million people for nothing”, he insisted, adding that the voter registration exercise “didn’t go well as expected”.

A few days ago, security analyst Col Festus Aboagye (retired) described the timing of the compilation of the 2020 voter register as bad.

“The timing of the voter registration was wrong”, he told Prah Jr on Tuesday, 11 August 2020.

In his view, the new register should have been compiled after the Professor Ken Attefuah-led National Identification Authority (NIA) had finished with its work so that everybody eligible to have had the Ghana card, got it so they could use the same document for compiling the new voter register. “No passport”, he said.

The Electoral Commission used the Ghana card and passport as the only two breeder documents for the compilation of the new register. Eligible voters without any of the two documents had to rely on the guarantor system, where two Ghanaians had to vouch for their eligibility.

Meanwhile, the EC said on Wednesday, 12 August 2020 that a total of 16,932,492 persons have been captured onto the new register by the end of the exercise on Sunday, 9 August 2020. The EC says the overall registration exercise was successful, as it was “inclusive, participatory, orderly and peaceful.”