Ghana: Group urges EC to clean voters register before election 2016

The Coalition of Domestic Election Observers CODEO wants the Electoral Commission to ensure a clean voters register for the 2016 elections.

This come on the back of the EC’s call on political parties to state their stance on the NPP’s proposal for a new register since, according to the party, the current one is bloated and discredited.

Speaking in an interview with Citi News, the Co-Chair of CODEO, Professor Miranda Greenstreet stated that the EC should be able to assure Ghanaians that the voters register is credible enough for the upcoming elections.

“I must be quite honest that from the point of view of CODEO, we do not believe that an election can be organized if the register is not good enough. But there are several ways in dealing with the register. A register can be cleaned up, you can start a new register, you can try and eliminate all the problems and we are not in a position to tell the Electoral Commission to scrap the whole register because there are several ways that this can be done. So we leave it at the moment to the EC.”

In another development, the Chairman of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), Kofi Portuphy has said, it would be expensive to heed to calls by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for a new voters register.

He argued that the country at this point did not need a new voters register, citing economic issues as a major factor for this.

“We must always be thinking about the economy in terms of what it takes to build a register. If a nation cannot afford it, what do we do? So there are other ways of looking at the register not necessarily saying let's change it, I’m saying that it is expensive,” he said in a Citi News interview.

Source: Citifmonline