The Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) has called on the Electoral Commission (EC) to concentrate on alleged voter suppression.
CODEO in a live discussion on the theme ‘Registration Amidst A Pandemic: Success, Intimidation, Violence, The Full Account’, disclosed that its observers on the ground during the voters’ registration exercise realised some challenges related to the exercise of which a notable one was the interference of party agents in the exercise.
According to the Coalition, some citizens were not able to register because some party agents claimed they do not recognize them. Speaking for the coalition, Rhoda Osei Afful, the Project Manager cited Jomoro as one of the areas such conduct occurred.
“Apart from that, there are other issues we had related to the conduct of party agents. So, there are other parts where you get people basically saying ‘I’m not going to let you register because I don’t know you.’ I mean today for instance, in some district offices of the Electoral Commission in Jomoro, you have party activists virtually standing there and blocking people from registering just because they say they don’t know them.”
Expressing her frustration, Mrs. Afful could not comprehend why people will be prevented from registering in a particular constituency or district because they are assumed not to reside there.
“How can one person be in a district office of the Electoral Commission and say ‘I don’t know you therefore, I’m not going to allow you register.’ In one instance I think it had to take the intervention of the district officer to come in and allow people to register but there are other places where our observers tell us people were helpless, they had to go back because there were other people who had appointed themselves as citizen spectators saying ‘I don’t know you’. And sometimes we focus so much on nationality but there are people who think that if you don’t live in the constituency or district, you cannot register with them, so absurd.”
Another challenge the Project Manager stated that her outfit observed was the guarantee process or the vouching system. According to her, this had been raised as a concern at the initial stages before the exercise began but to no avail.
She went ahead to state the two major problems associated with the guarantee process or the vouching system but hopeful that the EC would build a credible database in the future.
“The guarantee system has two major challenges; one is subject to abuse and the other point is that if you don’t take care sometimes it can create tension and other ineligible people can get into the register. These concerns remain and if you look at some of the issues that have come out, today, the EC had a statement out about one of the videos that had come out where about 60 or so people had managed to register and these are suspected to be Ivorians. There are other parts of the country where people have been registered, they have been even prosecuted, people have been sentenced to jail. So, for many of these cases when you look at it, they were able to register because they got people to vouch for them. So, these are the challenges we have with the vouching system. We’re hoping that moving forward, we can really focus on building a credible database that we can use.”
However, she emphasized that there are situations where by people genuinely need guarantors hence this challenge must be addressed.
“I understand there are instances where people genuinely can’t register unless people vouch for them but the issue is about the ID. If you have the national ID system, that challenge really will not arise so its something that we have to look at otherwise this problem about the poisoned tree and its fruits and all of that will continue to come up because you still get people who are able to manage and get through the process just because some people are not playing their roles as good citizens either by allowing themselves to be vouched for or vouching for other people. So, we have to look at that system because it has a lot of challenges.”
Notwithstanding, Mrs. Afful stated that the voters’ registration exercise in general was a smooth one based on other indicators such as the performance of the biometric registration devices, the rules and regulations put in place among others.
