Ghana: New CI Will Guarantee Integrity, Credibility of Voters’ Register – Minority Parties

Political parties with no representation in Parlia­ment have insisted that the new Constitutional Instrument (CI) will guarantee the integrity and credibility of the voters’ regis­ter and reduce chaos at registration centres.

They explained that lives of voters matter, they needed to pro­tect and ensure that agitations are reduced to the barest minimum.

The Group called on the Leg­islature to support and assist the Electoral Commission (EC) to lay its new CI in the House.

Ato Dadzie, General Secretary for the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP) and Spokesperson for the Group, stated at a press conference in Accra and noted that discussions for a new CI to introduce the National Identifica­tion Card as evidence of identity to apply for voter registration started in October 2021.

He said it was preceded by a two-day retreat by the EC in April to discuss the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections and the EC wrote to 24 political parties at the time to inform them to attend an Inter Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting on November 24, 2021, to discuss a draft of the new CI, which was attached to their letter.

“We all engaged in a lot of deliberations and series of meet­ings, which included civil society organisations for almost a year and resolved to accept to use the National Identification Card as ev­idence of identification to anyone who applies for registration as a voter.

“Since the law could not take retrospective effect under the 1992 Constitution, persons who were yet to be registered voters will require only the National Identification Card as evidence of identification to deal with the issues of having minors and foreigners on the voters’ register,” Mr Dadzie intimated.

Mr Dadzie contended that since the beginning of the 4th Republic, both the New Patriot­ic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had levelled several accusations against themselves, including the busing of supporters and sometimes minors and foreign­ers to registration centres.

He lamented that those ac­cusations had sometimes led to fisticuffs and gunshots at regis­tration centres resulting in those centres being labelled as flash points however, they would welcome a system to prevent minors and foreigners from being on the voters’ register.