The Ghana Electoral Commission's chair, Jean Mensa, has emphasized that the electoral body's proposed constitutional amendment, which would make the Ghana Card the only form of voter registration, is not intended to deny Ghanaians the right to vote.
Addressing to the media on Friday at the EC's headquarters, Jean Mensa revealed that the Commission is not interested in maintaining the guarantor system, which she claimed has outlived its purpose. As a result, the Ghana card has been chosen as the only form of identity for voting.
The usage of the Ghana Card, according to Jean Mensa, is the safest approach to guarantee the accuracy of Ghana's electoral roll.
We do not intend to reinstate the guarantor system for the CI that is currently before Parliament because we don't think it has been successful for us. We should have adopted a system to allow those without valid identification to register when we first started this trip thirty years ago, but now that we have the Ghana Card, we must rely on it since it is the most reliable means to guarantee the integrity of our register.
According to her, the Commission's desire to "deliver credible, transparent, fair, and peaceful elections" was motivated by the problems it faced into during the 2020 registration period and served as the basis for the proposed CI that is currently being considered by Parliament.
"As a commission that is committed to holding elections that are credible, transparent, fair, and peaceful, we were eager to establish and uphold the integrity of the foundational document, the voters' register, which is why we proposed using the Ghana Card as the only document for identifying a person's citizenship or age."
We learned through the 2020 Registration Exercise that a number of minors and foreigners who used the guarantor system's window ended up on our roll. The District Registration Review Committees (DRRCS) were set up by the Electoral Commission to work for many weeks to remove the names of children and foreigners from the Register in preparation for the 2020 election. The names of people who were not eligible to vote were removed from our [electoral] roll after a significant amount of time and work. We removed 15,000 people from the Registry and challenged about 40,000 children and aliens.
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