Ex-District Chief Executive for Atwima Nwabiagya, Nana Asare Bediako, has alleged that the Electoral Commission’s insistence on using only the Ghana Card for a limited registration exercise it wants to hold for the 2024 Elections, forms part of a ploy to disenfranchise members of opposition parties.
According to him, because the government had foreknowledge of what it was going to do, it intentionally made the National Identification Authority (NIA) spend more time in New Patriotic Party strongholds to issue more Ghana Cards to its members.
Asare Bediako, who made these remarks in a Hello FM interview monitored by GhanaWeb, on Tuesday, added that if the proposal of the EC to use only the Ghana Card for voters’ registration stands a lot of National Democratic Congress members will be disenfranchised.
“We know that the Ashanti Region and the Eastern Region are the strongholds of the NPP. If you would recall during the mass Ghana Card registration exercise, the NIA spent more time in these two regions. They were there for several days after the deadline for registration in these regions had passed.
“We complained bitterly about it but they did not listen, not knowing that they had an agenda. Even in the Eastern Region, the registration in the Akan-dominated areas continued for serval weeks after the deadline,” he said in Twi.
He, however, urged the EC to resend its decision because it will have a negative impact on Ghana’s democratic tenets.
The EC has stated that the guarantor system will no longer be used for the registration of voters in Ghana because it has a lot of issues that affect the quality of the electoral register, citinewsroom.com reports.
Deputy Chairman of the commission in charge of operations, Samuel Tettey, who disclosed this, said that his outfit would only be using the Ghana Card for the next voters’ registration.
He added that no Ghanaian would be disenfranchised because persons who do not have the voter’s card can go to the district offices of the commission to get registered anytime they get the Ghana Card.
The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has welcomed the decision of the Electoral Commission of Ghana to abolish the guarantor system and the use of only the Ghana Card for the upcoming continuous voters’ registration for the 2024 election.