Dear Electoral Commission of Ghana, Article 45 of the Constitution instructs you “to undertake programmes for the expansion of the registration of voters”. You are inviting an estimated 1.4 million citizens who are not on the voters’ roll to your district offices to register from September 12 – October 2, 2023. Now almost all political parties have kicked against your decision to limit the process to only your district offices.

It is difficult to appreciate why you fail to see the unreasonableness of your decision and the wholesomeness of their opposition. It is sound logic and fair that these would-be voters, the majority turning 18 after the 2020 elections, are not put to cost and struggle to register to exercise their right to vote in 2024.

Times are hard. Please listen, use or include electoral areas as centres for the exercise rather than expect some people to travel 50 to 80 kilometres to a district centre to register. Why must a citizen spend their day travelling to register, even though it is not guaranteed that they will not have to find accommodation and face frustrations over a couple of days to be able to register?

The EC is supposed to enable, facilitate and not frustrate a citizen’s exercise of their sacred right and obligation to vote. It is obvious your insistence on only your district offices with only about four officers as centres does not give expression to the constitutional dictate to expand voter registration. It certainly disables rather than enables citizens to exercise their right to be registered to vote.

In Ghana, one constituency, Tain, decided elections in 2008 with less than five thousand votes making the difference between the winner and the loser. The general impression that the EC is often unnecessarily difficult, acting as a law onto itself is not good for such a critical public service body.

In 2015, the EC’s unintelligent intransigence and unreasonable conduct led the Supreme Court to halt a nationwide district assembly election because one individual, Benjamin Eyi Mensah’s rights to participate was violated with impunity. It cost tax-payers, not EC officers, millions of cedis to re-organize those elections.

The court has held in the famous Ransford France that no one citizen must be deprived of his right to exercise his franchise. A right the court has held even prisoners should not be denied. Recently, your refusal to agree even to minor changes to your botched C.I. with resorting to the Ghana Cards as the sole source of identification almost giving a bad name to an otherwise most credible, most reliable identification system for a clean and empowered Ghana.

The Ghana Card, without argument, will become the sole passport for everything requiring an ID card from 2024. Whatever your reasons, sound logic demands that you listen to the political parties and citizens without whom you have no existence or a job. It does terribly bad damage to your image to have chiefs and the NCCE pleading with you to listen. That’s My Take.

Samson Lardy Anyenini
August 2, 2023