The West African country has, if anything, received accolades for its political stability, peaceful transition from one political party to another and relative peace, making it an oasis of peace in a sub-region that rocked by civil wars and social disturbance.
Now many of Ghanaian have placed their hope on the biometric registration system for a free and fair national elections next year.
Apart from the excitement the scheduled elections generated in Ghana, it also provokes apprehension of a possible descent into chaos threatened by some politicians if the final verdict does not go their way.
There have been always accusations and counter-accusations of a host of real or imagined electoral malpractices ranging from double voting by a single individual, impersonation, vote stealing often preceded by open intimidation from political opponents, usually in their strongholds.
Election days are thus quite eventful in Ghana. Instead of keeping to their pledge to abide by the regulations of the electoral process, some politicians and their collaborators, desperate to win or cling to power at all cost, end up doing the unthinkable, even go too far as to juggle with poll figures in their favor.
Thus, the joint pledge by all political parties to ensure flawless, transparent, free and fair election has never been completely fulfilled.
The scenario became a bit blurred when international observers, who hardly witness polls in difficult terrains of the country, were quick to admit to a free and fair elections, when, indeed, electoral malpractices occurred.
In most cases, such malfeasances are alleged to run into monstrous proportions if the voting occurred in a party’s stronghold where representatives of rival political parties were scared off by intimidation, threats of beatings and even death.
To prevent eventualities as such, party faithful or foot soldiers policed the polling stations and refused to budge until voting ends and counting begins for fear that their political rivals might try to doctor poll results or figures in their favor.
Ben Ephson, a pollster and editor of the Daily Dispatch, provided instances of polling stations where there were more registrations than the total number of voters during national elections in 2004.
Ephson disclosed his findings in his book “How the NPP (the New Patriotic Party) and NDC (National Democratic Congress) Inflated Voter Figures in Elections”, published just before the 2008 election.
“The excess votes were recorded as a result of initial recorded votes being adjusted, with figures being added on or being changed. For example, if the figure 70 is written, 8 can be put before it to make it now read 870. Or 110 votes recorded can be mutilated to read 440 votes,” he wrote.
Ephson cited an example the Ayawaso West constituency in Accra, where the voters register put 650 names but the total votes cast for the presidential election was 1,158 while 508 excess votes were registered.
There were no doubt that a lot of things happened behind the scenes during the elections and the voting that could be traced to the main actors in this drama, the NDC and (NPP) which had more followers than the Convention People’s Party (CPP), People’s National Convention (PNC) and the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP).
To avert these electoral crises and ensure a more credible election, all the political parties formed an Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) to set out modalities and ground rules for electoral processes.
With both the NPP and NDC having leapt from opposition to power and vice versa, there is every possibility that neither is willing to lose their guard but will strive to be vigilant to make sure there is no cheating in the general election in 2012.
The Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana concluded that one of the measures to avoid malpractices during elections is to intensify vigilance at polling stations to make sure polls are actually free and fair.
The conclusion led to the clamor for the use of biometric registration and a verification process to curtail any form of cheating in the polls.
The Electoral Commission is, therefore, seeking to replace the current voters registers with a biometric (electronic) ones in the next national elections.
Officials of the commission said that the process would involve the electronic installation of names, pictures and thumbprints of prospective voters, all estimated to cost over 53 million US dollars.
In a report of the Special Budget Committee of Parliament on the 2011 budget estimates for the EC, majority leader Cletus Avoka, who is also chairman of the committee, said that the estimated cost would have to be dealt with in a separate budget because it was not captured in the 2011 budget prepared by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.
However, the financial minister Kwabena Duffuor has assured that funds would be made available to the EC for the important national exercise.
The EC has embarked on a program to sensitize the political parties, civil society and the public to the electoral process. It will also build its human resource capacity and develop its infrastructure to achieve its set objective.
The electoral commissioner, Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, said last Tuesday that the commission had focused on the biometric registration process and not its verification, which required additional funds.
He told a forum organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Accra that though the two complemented each other, the EC would first go ahead with the registration and later the verification when it has received adequate funds for it.
Political parties have also placed their hopes on the verification aspect of the new system, believing that it will automatically prevent electoral fraud that has characterized previous elections.
Concerns over the biometric registration do not center on rejecting the use of the biometric per se but on various aspects of the exercise such as technical, logistics and legal issues, transparency of the process, timeliness, security, and verification features of the system.
Afari-Gyan said confusion could easily surround the voter biometric registration project as a result of misinformation arising from the lack of knowledge or malice.
“So it is important to engage with stakeholders towards building consensus on the direction of the process. Moreover, ultimately, the generality of Ghanaian people must know what problem biometric voter registration is intended to address, as well as how they are expected to participate in the process,” he stated.
The EC chairman said any multiple registration that may appear anywhere in Ghana under the system would be found out through a full search of the fingerprints and photographs of registrants.
A confirmed multiple registrations will, therefore, not only be expunged from the register but the persons concerned will also be dealt with by the law.
According to the commissioner, Ghana will be divided into zones but the EC is currently considering various zoning options and will engage the political parties to secure their consensus on that exercise before its implementation.
“This decision is informed by the fact that even though registration will be polling station-based, with 6,500 kits, it is obvious that the EC cannot carry out registration at all the projected 23,000 polling stations at the same time,” he added.
But funding problems still remain. The EC has received 50 million US dollars out of the budgeted 80 million dollars for the registration exercise.
It will need an additional 50 million dollars to equip each polling station with two verification systems to undertake an effective verification on the day of the election.
Afari-Gyan told the eager politicians that the biometric register was no solution to all the electoral challenges the country faced but rather vigilance on Election Day as no machine would be vigilant enough for the political parties.
However, he admitted that the biometric register per se cannot prevent electoral fraud and that only vigilance on the part of party agents can ensure a free and fair election.
While Ghanaians continue to pin their hopes on a biometric voters’register, they must heed the electoral commissioner’s advice to continue to deploy party faithful as polling agents to check any electoral malpractices during the 2012 general election.
It would seem, therefore, manual or biometric, only vigilance can ensure that Ghana’s 2012 general election would determine whether they would be free and fair or not.
Ghanaians can pin their hopes on the biometric voter registration so long as they can complement this with total vigilance at every polling station.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ray Ankomah
Quelle/Source: Coastweek, 04.11.2011
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