DAILY
GUIDE can authoritatively report that despite the hide and seek with
the issue of validation, the Electoral Commission (EC) has in principle
agreed to do validation or “verification”, as it puts it.
In a
letter sent to all political parties constituting the Inter-Party
Advisory Committee (IPAC), the EC attached a document, titled ‘Audit of
the Voters Register’, in which it outlined the process of cleaning up
the register it intends to use during the exhibition process on the
election calendar.
The document says that the exhibition period,
which usually lasts two weeks, will be extended, in line with the
recommendation of the five-member panel that looked into the case for a
new register, and will take place in all polling stations across the
country.
Significantly, the document states that the EC will
deploy biometric verification devices (BVDs) at all polling stations
during the exhibition exercise.
The explanation the EC gives is
what is said to effectively amount to validation. The EC states, “The
use of BVDs at Exhibition Centres [is] to get people who check their
names to be verified during exhibition.”
Furthermore, the EC
explains that “this, apart from authenticating the voters, would also
reduce the incident of false verification and improve efficiency of BVDs
on election day.”
When DAILY GUIDE contacted Martin Adjei-Mensah
Korsah, the Director of Elections for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), he
confirmed that the party had received such a letter for inputs and duly
sent its response to the Commission last Monday, the deadline.
NPP’s Position
Mr
Adjei-Mensah Korsah said the EC has, through its own actions, made the
case in support of validation. “The EC has shown with the way that it
intends to undertake this exhibition process with validation machines in
all polling stations that it has the resources, in terms of personnel,
equipment and funds, to undertake verification or validation or
authentication, whichever name it chooses to call it. What is left is
for the EC to take the logical step to make it mandatory so that it can
truly serve as a proper and necessary auditing process.”
But the
NPP is not convinced by this ‘validation’ move. “Yes, it means, in
principle, the EC will undertake validation. But I am afraid it may end
up being a waste of limited resources,” said Martin.
He added,
“The EC is going through this whole exercise of verification but it
appears more to be seen to satisfy what is in the report of the VCRAC
Crabbe Committee report, which the committee members themselves are now
running away from, than to really clean the register to help give us
credible elections.”
This is because, according to the NPP, the
EC is “stubbornly refusing to make the validation mandatory, and without
a law backing it, those who choose to stay away will still have their
names on the register for 2016.
“What is proposed in the Panel
Report is for every registered voter who intends to vote in 2016 to show
up for this verification or authentication exercise or have their names
removed from the register, just like what happens when a new register
is compiled. But to provide BVDs at all polling stations during
exhibition when you have not made validation compulsory is simply to
throw away money, frankly,” the NPP elections director said.
Describing
the EC’s move as “bizarre and perplexing”, Mr Korsah pointed out that
“By refusing to make it mandatory, those who do not show up, including
the dead, will still have their names on the electoral roll for 2016. We
are likely to still end up with some 600,000 names of dead people and
several tens of thousands of non-nationals on the register.”
EC’s Justification
The
EC document justifies the reason behind this auditing at exhibition
centres. It says that the “audit process will address three categories
of unqualified persons on the register: deceased persons, minors and
foreigners, as well as multiple registrations.”
But how successful can this be when the exercise is not mandatory for those who wish to vote in 2016?
Whiles,
per the EC document, the Commission intends to spend a lot of money to
ensure “wide publicity of the exercise,” it will also create a portal on
its website “to allow voters to check their names and registration
details and also allow the public to check and lodge
challenges/objections.”
Validation Law
The
NPP sees this as a contradiction. “Whiles using technology is
efficient, it would also mean that many registered voters would not see
the need to show up at the exhibition centres. The only thing to compel
them to do so is to pass a law to make it mandatory for those who are
interested in being on a validated list for the 2016 elections,” the
party man said.
Mr Korsah explained that the same way the
compulsory use of BVD during voting was backed by law, the EC must be
sincere and prudent enough to make validation of registered voters also
mandatory.
For those who say making validation compulsory would disenfranchise Ghanaian voters, the NPP called it a “red herring.”
“It
is important we keep the records of registered voters up to date and
credible, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of one-man-one-vote,”
said the NPP.
“Even for registration, there is an administrative
cut-off point where after a period even if [your] name is on the
register but [you are] not in time to go through the process of
exhibition, etc., you will lose the opportunity to vote in that given
election.”
To stress the point, the NPP pointed to Regulation 9
(4) of the Public Elections (Registration of Voters) Regulations, 2016
(CI 91), which reads: “The Commission shall include in the register of
voters, the name of a person who qualifies for registration as a voter
and is registered but shall not include in the register of voters the
name of a person who qualifies to register as a voter for an election
but who registers less than sixty days to that election.”
This
means that even those with their names on the register can be
disenfranchised because of administrative convenience, the NPP argued. |
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