PRESS CONFERENCE ORGANISED BY THE DANQUAH INSTITUTE ON THE DECISION BY THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION TO UNDERTAKE A LIMITED VOTER REGISTRATION EXERCISE

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Danquah Institute, I wish to thank you for making time, on such short notice, to be present at this all important press conference.

We called you here today to put an issue before you, which we believe is of the utmost importance to the success of Ghana’s democracy. The way and manner this issue is currently being handled, and being treated as a triviality by the Electoral Commission is worrying and poses a serious threat to the stability of our democratic and electoral process.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Electoral Commission announced on the 9th of May that it intended to embark on a revision of the voters register from Friday, June 20 to Sunday, June 29, 2014. According to the Deputy Chairman (Operations) of the EC, Mr. Amadu Sulley, this revision is a limited voter registration intended to offer Ghanaians who have attained the voting age of 18 years since the last registration in 2012, and also for those who were above the age of 18, and could not, for various reasons, register as voters in 2012.

This intended move by the EC is the source of worry for the Danquah Institute and many well-meaning Ghanaians.

It is an admission on the part of the EC that all is well with Ghana’s voter register, which cannot be the case. As we all saw in the Presidential Election Petition, which challenged the declaration of John Mahama as winner of the 2012 elections by Dr Afari Gyan, Ghana’s voter’s register cannot be relied upon for the 2016 general elections, and any other election for that matter.

Admissions during Election Petition The case at the Supreme Court revealed clearly for all to see that all is not well with Ghana’s register. The petitioners in the case proved this point beyond all reasonable doubt.

A case in point was the provision of different voters register to the New Patriotic Party, for instance. It is recalled that the total number of registered voters that the EC furnished the Petitioners’ party, the NPP, with was fourteen million and thirty-one thousand, six hundred and eighty (14,031,680). Subsequently, it came to the notice of the Petitioners that the EC had on Sunday, 9th December 2012, declared the total number of registered voters as fourteen million, one hundred and fifty eight thousand, eight hundred and ninety (14,158,890). Furthermore, on the same date, the EC posted on its website the total number of registered voters as fourteen million and thirty one thousand, seven hundred and ninety three (14,031,793) showing a clear disparity of one hundred and twenty seven thousand and ninety seven (127,097). The Chairman of the EC, during the trial, could not provide cogent reasons for this discrepancy.

Furthermore, although a common register was compiled for both the presidential and parliamentary elections, it turned out, from the results declared by the EC, that the total number of registered voters in respect of the presidential election exceeded that of the registered voters for the parliamentary elections by one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, two hundred and ten (127,210) voters.

Upon further scrutiny of the voters register, it was also shown in court that some of the voter ID numbers supposedly belonging to some of the foreign registered voters could not be found on the general voters register, that is to say, they were/are fake identities. These fake ID numbers for the multiple names also had a unique pattern. For most of them, the pattern was to add "1" to, or subtract "1" from, the 5th digit of the ID number and subtract ‘2’ from the last digit. For example: a) Abudul-Mumin Bashiru (No. 159 on the list) with voter ID number – 1852801842; and b) Abdul-Mumin Bashiru (No. 572 on the list), with voter ID number - 1852901840.

For the avoidance of detection, the EC also placed the duplicate names far apart from each other, making their detection difficult. For instance, one Abdul Bassit Ibrahim was placed 11th on the list, while the second Abdul Bassit Ibrahim was placed 465th on the list. Similarly, while a Paul Yaw Essel was placed at No. 338 another Paul Yaw Essel was at No. 603.

The Chairman of the EC admitted all of these in court. Till date, we have no idea as to what the exact number of registered voters in Ghana is. And yet still, the EC wants to go ahead and conduct additional registration, without cleaning the voters’ register? This, certainly, does not bode well for future elections in our dear nation.

Bloated Register In the words of Dr. Afari Gyan concerning Ghana’s 2008 voters register; “If our population is indeed 22 million, then perhaps 13 million people on our register would be statistically unacceptable by world standards. If that is the case, then it may mean that there is something wrong with our register.”

As per Dr. Afari Gyan’s assertions in 2008, a voter registers containing 12,472,758 out of a population of 22 million persons which represents a percentage of 56.69% was statistically unacceptable, then 56.20% voter population in 2012 is clearly statistically unacceptable.