A former Director-General of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), Ernest Thompson, has revealed that the Electoral Commission (EC) must closely work with the National Identification Authority (NIA) if it is going to use the Ghana Card as the sole document for elections.

According to him, the move will ensure that millions of prospective voters are not disenfranchised and the integrity of the voters’ register is not compromised.

“The EC must work closely with the NIA moving forward. This is because the EC is not only interested in us voting, but it should also be interested in not disenfranchising people. It should be interested in the register because it will not only be for today, it might be for other elections so they need to work together.”
Ernest Thompson

Mr Thompson indicated that the NIA will need more assistance because when it comes to biometric registration, the Authority hasn’t “done much if you only register and you print a card and the registrant hasn’t got his or her card”.

“So we should concentrate and help them to ensure that cards get to the registrants.”
Ernest Thompson

It will be recalled that in July this year, the EC placed before Parliament a draft C.I titled: Public Elections (Registration of Voters) Regulations, 2021, which is expected to regulate continuous voter registration. Prior to this, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) accused the EC of planning to compile a new voters’ register for the 2024 general election, with the Ghana Card as the only source document.

Opposition to a new register compilation

The Minority Leader in Parliament, Haruna Iddrisu, stated that any move by the EC to compile a new voters register with the Ghana Card solely as the mode of identification would not bode well for the country, especially when the EC had already expended huge sums of money to compile a new register which was used for the 2020 general election.

The EC debunked the assertion by the NDC and indicated that the new C.I was only meant to regulate continuous registration, with the Ghana Card as the source document.

Similarly, the former Electoral Commission (EC) boss, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, warned of the possibility of multiple voting and ballot stuffing in the 2024 polls should the Commission’s proposed Constitutional Instrument receive parliamentary approval.

Dr Afari-Gyan explained multiple voting as “where one person votes more than once”. He further explained that ballot stuffing is “where an unscrupulous person puts into the ballot box additional ballot papers that were not duly cast” in accordance with the election law.

Dr Gyan expressed that the current Biometric Verification devices used to identify voters at polling stations “do not so to speak, talk to each other in the field to indicate who has voted at which polling station”.

“Until such a time that the devices are configured to be interactive in this way, my concern about any of the two registers being used at the polling station is that it opens the door more widely to two kinds of voting infractions, namely multiple voting and ballot stuffing”.
Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan