Voter Register Exhibition Exposes EC

-Over Bogus NHIS List

Development and reports on the ongoing voter exhibition exercise appear to have vindicated groups and individuals who insisted that the list of 63, 000 persons presented by the Electoral Commission to the Supreme Court, as representing those who registered in 2012 with National Health Insurance Scheme cards, was bogus.

The list was presented on the orders of the apex court of the land, which ordered the expulsion of the names of NHIS registrants from the register.
Since the exhibition exercise began Monday, there have been countless reports of people whose names have been wrongfully deleted from the voters register and put among the category of registrants who used NHIS cards. The affected people have insisted they never used the cards to register. Many of the affected even say they are not subscribers of the NHIS and so could not be in possession of the cards.

This has left many people convinced that the EC indeed conjured the list it presented to the Supreme Court as NHIS registrants.

Angered by the conduct of the EC, some of the affected persons have protested seriously to demonstrate their displeasure at what they see as attempt to disenfranchise them from voting in the upcoming elections.
Some affected residents in Kasoa in the Central Region yesterday stormed the EC's office in the region with eggs and schnapps to invoke curses on the commission over the deletion of their names from the voter register.
The angry residents disclosed that more than 1,500 names had been deleted from the register in only one polling station in the Kai Me Bre Downtown electoral area in Kasoa. They insisted all the affected persons did not use NHIS cards to register.
Some women even threatened to embark on a naked demonstration if their names did not appear in the electoral roll.
Also on Monday, angry residents surrounded the EC's office in Cape Coast threatening to halt the exhibition exercise, after accusing the EC of scheming to disenfranchise them by deleting their names from the register. They also insisted they never registered with NHIS cards.
Meanwhile, the opposition New Patriotic Party says it has evidence to confirm that the EC deliberately removed the names of some of its members from the register.
The NPP believes the 'conjured' NHIS list had been prepared in such a way that the ruling National Democratic Congress would benefit fully from the exercise.
"If we verify the list, it looks more like an NDC prepared list to the EC to make sure that they take away our supporters from the register. A lot of people have complained to us that they did not register with the NHIS card and yet their names have been deleted from the register. We have also seen a lot of people who have come to us saying they indeed registered with the NHIS card but their names have not been deleted," Greater Accra Regional Secretary of the NPP disclosed.

Also information available to the Daily Statesman indicates that in the Sunyani West Constituency, out of the 22 polling stations in Chiara, a stronghold of the NPP, only one polling station was affected by the deletion exercise.

All the 157 persons whose names were deleted in the Sunyani West constituency came from Akyeremanyaa, a stronghold of the NPP and the largest among all the polling stations in Chiraa.

Interestingly, most of the affected registered voters had vehicle registration numbers as their supposed NHIS numbers.