Research Analyst at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Gildfred Boateng Asiamah, says the Electoral Commission (EC) and the police were not adequately prepared for the ongoing limited registration exercise.
According to him, each election year witnesses a level of violence, and during such moments, the police have been on standby to settle disputes.
However, during the recent limited registration, the organization noticed that both the EC and police were not adequately prepared.
“We clearly see that the preparation of the electoral commission and other key public agencies for this voter registration exercise was inadequate. I want to say was poor. The police has not been very proactive and does not appear prepared for this exercise.
“ It’s been observed that voter registration in this country is always violent. It has never been incident free. In 2020, people died over the course of the electoral cycles, we see a lot of violence happening during voter registration but we have the police fully prepared and deploy their men on election day and even have stand by forces ready to take action.
“But you don’t see that kind of preparedness, you don’t see the posture of the police being prepared to curb any form of violence and deal with people who perpetuate some of these incident,” he said.
Also, he said the EC failed to provide the necessary education to individuals on the electoral processes that new registrants would have to go through.
Additionally, Mr Asiamah said the EC had also not conducted sufficient public education processes, which, he said, affected the smoothness of the process.
“For the Electoral Commission and other stakeholders, we clearly see that the education that was required to let people know that there are processes and procedures that they have to follow whenever they are aggrieved during the course of the registration. We didn’t see that kind of education.
“Again the education that we needed to build confidence in the processes, we also didn’t see that,” he added.
Meanwhile, he advised the EC to step up with public education.