<<Print>>Weeks after the New Patriotic Party (NPP) alleged that Ghana’s voters register is bloated with names of Togolese; the Danquah Institute is also claiming that the register has over two million ghost names.
According to the institute, some of the pictures in the nation’s voters’ register have defects, which suggest that the Electoral Commission’s database has been “tampered with.”
Speaking at a press conference in Accra on Thursday, the Executive Director of the Institute, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe said, the only reason for the defected pictures is that, the Electoral Commission’s (EC) database has been compromised.
“These pictures as I have already stated were not captured in a live environment but were rather scanned in the database of the EC, it is criminality, pure and simple. There is no way you can use a camera to capture an image and when you want to print it out you begin to see pinks on it. Its impossible.”
“…these are ghost names, and we estimate up to two million ghost names of all sorts on the register.”
The Executive Director argued that “we call them ghosts because if they are eligible to register, they would simply have done it in a normal way like the rest of us. They would appear in a live environment, be captured and be processed like you and I who have valid voters register. Otherwise their appearance in the electoral row when they have images that have staples on them can only suggest that they don’t exist as human beings.”
Nana Attobrah Quaicoe said, that during processes towards the 2012 election, grave concerns were raised over the lack of transparency in the biometric process but the EC ignored them.
“The source code to access the database was only known to the vender STL and the EC, no political party had access to the source code for the software. Now the presence of these scanned pictures you are seeing offers more than sufficient, substantial, irrefutable that Ghana’s voters register and the whole EC’s data system as currently manned has been irredeemably compromised.”
The NPP had earlier argued that about 76,286 Togolese are on Ghana’s voters register, thus calling for a new one to be compiled.
But the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) argued otherwise saying a new voters register will not solve the situation.