President of policy think tank IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe has implored political parties in the country to coordinate and sanitize the nation’s voter’s register.
He is also calling on authorities to put in place an effective system for identifying voters.
[contextly_sidebar id=”ATeUEuqEEiSwziI4HXdMMiPL6WAzPU2Q”]The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has called for the compilation of a new voters register ahead of the 2016 elections; describing the existing one as lacking credibility.
But the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) believes that the existing voters register should be cleaned, rather than changed.
In an interview with Citi News, Franklin Cudjoe said all hands must be on deck toremove the names of minors and foreigners.
“I would say, let’s all come around and clean the register…Cleaning is the same as getting a new register anyway, I think it’s just a matter of semantics. Because the fact of the matter is that, even if we embark on a new voters register right now without any serious forms of identification, the minors will still get in there, the so called foreigners will also get in there. So what’s the point?”
“I feel sad for the political parties here; I feel that they should deal with it because the two parties themselves have vogued at attempts to get us a unified ID system. That unfortunately cannot continue… We can have a clean register, but if the basis to accepting people on the register itself is questionable, then we just went full circle and came back home to not. So I would suggest that they all sit together and clean it, that is why the voters register is opened annually so that we can all go in there and fetch it off all ineligible voters,” he added.
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana