Dr Mahamudu Bawumia
The 2016 vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has outlined reasons why the current voter register cannot be used for the 2016 general elections.
On the final day of the “Rise and Build” tour of the Eastern Region – led by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the party’s standard bearer – Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, addressing party faithful, stated that activists of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), who had been acting as public relations officers for the Electoral Commission (EC), had not advanced any reasons as to why the electoral roll should not be changed. Rather, Dr Bawumia noted, they had been playing the tribal card to challenge the evidence adduced by the NPP about the existence of foreigners on Ghana’s voter register.
Dr. Bawumia explained that the evidence presented to the Electoral Commission by the NPP revealed the existence of foreign voters, whose details were not captured in a live environment, but rather had their pictures scanned into the database of the EC. This, according to Nana Addo’s running mate, could only have been done by persons who had authorisation and codes to the database of the EC.
“By this action, the integrity of the voter register has been compromised. Clearly, we cannot trust the current handlers and managers of the register,” he said.
The NDC’s so-called biometric registration of its members across the country was also touched upon by Dr. Bawumia, stating categorically that “there is nothing ‘biometric’ about the NDC’s ongoing registration of its members.”
“All the NDC is doing is going round and asking for the voter ID card numbers as well as polling station codes. They don’t collect your fingerprints; they don’t even take your picture. The NDC then generates a membership card containing the same picture and biometric details as contained in the voter register,” he said.
“How did they get the biometric ID card details of their members? They have access to the EC’s database, and that is why they are producing the kinds of cards they are distributing to their members. We should be worried as Ghanaians,” Dr. Bawumia charged.
Dr. Bawumia recounted the current Supreme Court ruling which barred the use of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) card from being used as one of the IDs that make a person eligible for being registered as a voter. The ruling, according to Dr. Bawumia, meant that all registrations with the NHIS cards are illegal, unconstitutional and of no-effect.
“There are potentially millions of people who used NHIS cards to register. Unless we go back to the use of the Form 1A to verify and take out those who used NHIS cards to register, we can’t determine all those who used the cards. It will be an arduous exercise, and that is why we need a new register,” he added.
Another reason adduced by Dr. Bawumia was the statement made by the immediate past chairman of the EC, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, who after conducting the biometric registration exercise, announced to the general public that the provisional number of voters registered was a little less than 13 million, and that after cleaning the provisional register and verifying same, the EC would publish the final number of registered voters.
Surprisingly, according to Dr. Bawumia, when the EC announced the total number of registered voters, the number had inexplicably increased by over one million. “Till date the EC has not been able to tell us who constituted the extra one million people,” he said.
He recalled that during the proceedings of the election petition, Dr. Afari-Gyan was asked to explain why there was a difference of over 500,000 people between the parliamentary and the presidential rolls. The former EC chair attributed the difference to ‘overseas registrations.’
“In the Supreme Court, when we asked Dr. Afari-Gyan to produce details of the 500,000 people whom he had registered abroad, he only provided 705 names, out of which we had 52 persons who were engaged in multiple registrations,” he recalled.
These reasons, according to Dr. Bawumia, have so far been unchallenged by the NDC or any other stakeholder in the electoral process.
By Daniel Bampoe