2 million ghost names on Ghana’s electoral roll

• Posted on September 11, 2015September 11, 2015
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Policy think tank, Danquah Institute (DI), has made another startling revelation about the country’s voter register, claiming that there are two million ghost names on the electoral roll.

It comes on the heels of claims by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) that it had uncovered about 76,286 foreign nationals, mostly Togolese, on Ghana’s voter register in an ongoing investigation. For this reason, the party is pushing for an entirely new register ahead of the crucial 2016 general elections.

At a press conference in Accra yesterday, a director with the Danquah Institute, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, said: “We estimate up to two million ghost names of all sorts on the register.”

He wondered how printed photos were scanned, stapled or glued and used in the registration of some of the people who had found their names and faces on the register which has become a matter of raging controversy between the opposition and the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), asking rhetorically, “So how come the current register is full of stapled and scanned pictures?”

Suspicion

For Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, “This means that those scanned pictures were brought in from a different source and smuggled into the EC’s database. No political party could have entered the EC database to fraudulently insert such fake details to bloat the register in its favour.”

“Scanning people’s pictures and adding them to the electoral roll is a criminal offence and we will demand that the police look into this matter seriously, professionally and devoid of any ‘order from above’. Our electoral cycle can’t wait that long for another Anas investigation to prove to the chairperson of the EC the very rot that has been sufficiently uncovered already,” it said.

Besides, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe indicated, “Not even the temporary staff employed for registration could have done that. The only people capable of doing that are the people in control of the EC database. The presence of these scanned pictures you are seeing offers more than sufficient, substantial, irrefutable evidence that Ghana’s voter register and the whole EC database system, as currently manned, have been irredeemably compromised.”

Nana Attobrah went on, “These pictures, as I have already stated, were not captured in a live environment, but rather were scanned into the database of the EC,” he noted while showing samples of the pictures with staple marks on them, which he said bothered on criminality.

Effect

In effect, the DI director said, “The very people who have been tasked to protect the integrity of the electoral roll have either by themselves or through criminal connivance conspired to tamper with the register and with only one probable intention: to manipulate election results.”

It is for this reason that pressure groups like Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA), Movement for Change (MFC), Alliance for Accountable Governance (AFAG) and other associations, along with many ordinary Ghanaians, are preparing to walk from the Obra Spot at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Accra, to the headquarters of the Electoral Commission, located at Ridge, on Wednesday, September 16, 2015, to picket to drum home the case for a new voter register.

They have therefore indicated their readiness to defy a decision by the police not to allow the picketing to take place as planned.

“We are therefore calling on well-meaning Ghanaians, patriots, across all political parties, including those with no political affiliations, to join us to picket at the EC. Let us make them see that we mean business,” convener of the LMVCA, David Asante, told the media yesterday.

 By Charles Takyi-Boadu