Coronavirus: New voters register critical for election 2020 – Obiri Boahene

The Deputy General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Obiri Boahene has asserted that, it will be impossible to conduct election 2020 without the Electoral Commission (EC) compiling the new voters' register.

According to him, the new register will have to be compiled for the people of the newly created regions to exercise their voting rights.

In an interview on Happy98.9FM’s ‘Epa Hoa Daben’ he said, “With the voters' register, the identification code for the Ashanti Region is F and that of the Brong Ahafo is G. But with the creation of the Ahafo and Bono Regions, citizens in these regions will have no voting centers hence, the need to compile the new voters' register.”

When asked by host, Afrifa Mensah if the votes of these citizens cannot be transferred to solve the problem and do away with the compilation of a new voters register, Obiri Boahene answered in the negative. He said, “The EC went back to the drawing board and identified the need for a new voters' register after some research. They realized it would be difficult to transfer the votes because of the change that will come along with polling station numbers and codes.”

He, however, noted that if the timetable for the 2020 elections is affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, “we will declare a state of emergency. There will be no interim gov’t because there has to be continuity. We can’t say the gov’t should step down for an interim one because there was no election,” he said.

The National Identification Authority (NIA) has suspended its operations amidst the outbreak of COVID-19 in Ghana. The authority’s exercise which is supposed to help the EC compile the new voters register on the 18th of April, 2020 will affect the timetable of the EC.

This has raised a lot of concerns amongst Ghanaians who are uncertain if this delay will affect the 2020 general elections or not.