Ghana's Voter Register Appears Bloated - NPP-USA

In Ghana today much of our political discourse has been reduced to a shouting match and who can make the most ridiculous pronouncements to an ever ready media overly absorbed by sensationalism. Amidst all the noise, however, certain truths, or better yet, facts cannot be ignored. The New Patriotic tables, as part of its contention, the notion that Ghana's Electoral Commission has bloated the voter register to give itself the room to throw in illegal votes in favor of its preferred candidates. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will rule on the petition. But a quick look at some of our neighbors who recently concluded elections offer some insights that can hardly be ignored.

First Stop - Kenya.

After suffering a grueling civil conflict in the aftermath of her 2007 presidential election, the East African nation regrouped to pay attention to the basics in electioneering. Some would say their recent court petition challenging the 2013 election suggests that they may not have left some loopholes unclosed. But one thing they may have gotten right was the voters' register - or did they?

For a country of 41.6 million people, the number of registered voters heading into the 2013 election was 14.4million representing 34.1%. Ghana with just over half of the Kenyan population (25 million) has almost the same number of registered voters at 14.1 million representing 56.2%. With such a wide disparity, the obvious thing to do was to determine if ours is too high, or the Kenyans' number is too low. So we looked elsewhere.

Senegal with a population of 12.8 million registered 5.3 million voters or 41.5%. Nigeria came next with 162.5 million in population, 67.8 million registered voters or 41.7%. Finally Tanzania with 46.2 million registered 19.7 million voters representing 42.5%. So if four of our neighbors are averaging 39.95 as the percentage of their population that is registered to vote, what explains the more than 16 point differential between Kenya and Ghana?

There are four possible explanations. One, Ghana's Electoral Commission is more efficient than its peers and is thus better at the registration exercise. Two, Ghanaians are more politically astute and are more interested in exercising their civic responsibilities so they register to vote more than their peers in the four other countries. Three, Ghana's population is older so the voting age population is larger. And four, the voter register was indeed overly bloated. Much as our research team tried, it could not come up with evidence to support the first three possible explanations. That leaves explanation number four.

It is not clear if the NPP was aware of this voter register disparity between Ghana and other African countries prior to filing its petition and calling for the annulment of about 4 million illegal votes. But we hypothetically subtracted the 4 million votes from the current 14.1 million registered voters and arrived at 10,031,763. This number represents 40.2% of the population at large - squarely on the average of the four countries mentioned.

Will this study put an end to the shouting and the hurling of insults? May be not. But it is our fervent hope that at least some would look at these numbers, verify them, and may be arrive at a renewed impression about the current Supreme Court petition. After all, are we all not looking for the truth? Based on the findings of our research team, NPP-USA is of the opinion that Ghana's voter's register appears bloated, this enables the electoral commission to rig elections in favor of its preferred candidate, if it so desires.