Pro-opposition think tank, the Danquah Institute wants the Electoral Commission (EC) to postpone the limited registration exercise scheduled for next month.
According to the Institute, this will give the EC time to incorporate a process of voter validation for the registration exercise.
[contextly_sidebar id=”g22nHaH3vP0Ox0e3BdzQSs9z4gKEW3a6″]“The Danquah Institute by this news conference is asking the EC to postpone the date for the limited registration for another month or six weeks to consider the proposal of the panel and work towards incorporating validation with the limited exercise,” the Executive Director of the Danquah Institute, Nana Atoborah Quaicoo said.
The validation exercise as recommended by the Justice V.C.R.A.C Crabbe Panel, is a mandatory process which will allow registered voters to confirm their details in the register.
Mr. Quaicoo says over six hundred thousand ghosts names could be deleted if the validation is allowed.
“ Based on the reported number of registered voters in 2014 which shows that as many as 584,892 estimated number of voter death could have occurred cumulatively by the year 2016, and may well remain in the register of voters. This constitutes about 4% of eligible voters on the register. On the one hand, the margin is almost twice the margin by which presidential elections were won and more than 10 times the margin in the precedent elections.
“This is too wide a margin to entertain for several reasons. If you have 600,000 ghost names so to speak on the register, and you are comparing it to 2008 where we had a difference between the winner and the loser of about 45,000 votes, you can identify that there is a wide margin of manipulation.”
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By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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