Some voters at Kae Me Bre Downtown electoral area in the Awutu Senya West constituency of the Central Region, who have had their names removed from the register of voters, have called on the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) to take measures to have them re-registered immediately.
According to the assemblyman of the area, Jeffrey Mensah, who spoke on behalf of the affected persons, over 1,200 persons have had their records expunged from Ghana’s register of voters though no voter in the area registered to vote with a health insurance ID. “No one in my electoral area registered with a national health insurance card,” he lamented.
Ghana’s election management body was ordered by the Supreme Court on July 5 to take steps to immediately purge the country’s voter roll of persons, who registered to vote via National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) identification documents in 2012, since such ID was no cast-iron proof of Ghanaian citizenship. This was in addition to a directive from the land’s highest court to rid the electoral register of minors and the deceased.
The EC announced last week it had complied with the court order, with over 56,000 names expunged from the register, and informed the public that it had set July 18 to August 7 for re-registration of such ‘NHIS voters’ alongside the exhibition of the register of voters.
But speaking to Accra News on Wednesday July 20, on the third day of the exercise, Mr Mensah said the over 1,000 individuals, who had realised to their shock that their names were no longer in the register when they visited exhibition centres, had been asked to go to the office of the EC at Awutu Bereku to be re-registered.
He said when they followed up to the EC’s premises, they were informed network challenges had rendered the re-registration almost impossible for three days. He disclosed that on Wednesday July 20, only five of such persons had been re-registered by the EC, with the others returning home disappointed.
He said there were only two officials at the EC’s office attending to the large number of affected voters, with officials of the commission remaining tight-lipped over the situation. Further, Mr Mensah complained that power shortages had hampered the re-registration exercise.
The assemblyman, thus, appealed for an extension of the exhibition and re-registration exercise for voters at Kae Me Bre Downtown to enable them all get recaptured onto the electoral register for them to be eligible to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections later in the year.
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
