Everybody Agrees Voters' Register Is Flawed

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

August 19, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Everybody is in perfect agreement that Ghana's current Voters' Register is deeply flawed and numerically padded beyond credulity. And so it is laughable for Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia to presume to engage in the long-discredited art of sophistry in order to pretend that all is well with the Voters' Register. What is at issue here is how to sanitize it and make it wholesome and worthwhile for the sort of constitutional democratic culture Ghanaians have chosen to pursue. Like the General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), I believe that establishing a new Voters' Register from scratch would not necessarily guarantee a fair election next year.

One of the problems that need to be resolved is how to prevent the perennial registration of underage teenagers. This is a problem that began with the foundation of Ghana's First Republic. But more importantly, we need to find an effective means of identifying underage citizens who are either criminally instigated by party hacks, irrespective of ideological or political party affiliation, to register to vote, or who deliberately and mischievously pass themselves off as eligible voters. In most instances, I like to believe that the first-case scenario is often more reflective of the truth and reality of the illegal padding of the Voters' Register. We know the preceding for a fact because during the 2012 Presidential Election Petition, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the recently retired Chairman of the Electoral Commission, categorically acknowledged before the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel, that adjudicated the petition, that a critical mass of underage teens or minors had been registered to vote.

Dr. Afari-Gyan may or may not have known the specific number of minors or percentage of the same that had been registered to vote. As well, who illegally encouraged these minors to vote; and which regions of the country were most guilty of such criminal breach of the law. There was also the problem of over-voting, which Dr. Afari-Gyan initially pretended before the Atuguba panel not to know precisely what amounted to the classification of "over-voting." He would shortly be brought to his senses by the court. And so General Mosquito, as Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is popularly known, cannot pretend that all is hunky-dory about the current Voters' Register. He also cannot be taken seriously at his claim that Ghana's voting rate of 56-percent of the country's total population is normal or standard, and that anybody who questions the validity of such high voter's roll is, somehow, bereft of normal intelligence or intellectual capacity, whatever the latter means.

I ordinarily am not fond of comparing Ghana's percentage of eligible voters to any of the other countries in the West African sub-region, as a means of drawing any reliable conclusions about what a normal Voters' Register for Ghana ought to look like, in terms of magnitude. For no two West African countries have exactly the same rate of population growth or level of electoral cultural efficiency at any particular moment in time or history, just as our macro-economies have not been known to expand or shrink, for that matter, at the same rate. But then, I am neither a mathematician, an economist or statistician. What I firmly believe we ought to be doing, in order to get a better sense of the accuracy of the country's Voters' Register, is to study our population growth pattern over the past 20 to 40 years.

And then gauging from the preceding, also map out the pattern of growth of the various age groups, as traditionally delineated by census experts. And then we would be able to rationally debate questions of population growth in any interstitial/intermediate two-year period in-between our four-year election cycle. Even then, I confidently doubt that Ghana's population among eligible voters, or citizens, ages 18 and up increased by some 1.2 million between 2010 and 2012, as General Mosquito would have the rest of the world believe. Does any vehement refusal to think like the NDC's General-Secretary, a former elementary school Math teacher, make me, a College-English teacher, any less intelligent than the Mosquito Man? I prefer to let the dear reader decide.

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