Election 2020: University of Ghana survey says 64.9% Ghanaians want a new voter register, could this be a blow to the opposition party?

According to the survey, respondents from all the 16 regions of the country backed the decision with the Upper East Region leading with 79.45% of the 1,499 respondents.

The Survey

The survey was conducted by the Political Science Department of the university, in December 2019.

The department asked 27,500 respondents, “The Electoral Commission intends to compile a new voters’ register. Do you agree?”

74.42% of the 4,707 respondents in the governing New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) biggest stronghold, Ashanti Region backed the EC’s decision.

In the Volta Region, the biggest stronghold of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), 54.39% of the 1,800 respondents said they wanted a new voters’ register.

The most popular reason respondents gave for their support of the new register was “to ensure credibility” of the election results. This was 37.5%.

Others said the process would help eliminate deceased persons’ names from the register while others said it would help to detect and delete the names of non-citizens on the register.

Those who were not in support of the EC’s decision said it would be a waste of resources and some of them believed the “incumbent [party, NPP] wants to gain an advantage over the opposition [NDC].”

Demonstrations

Meanwhile, the opposition NDC has been leading some smaller opposition parties to resist the compilation of a new voters’ register.

The Inter-Party Resistance Against New Voters’ Register (IPRAN) on Tuesday, February 4, 2020, embarked on a demonstration to demand that the Electoral Commission (EC) pulls the breaks on plans to compile a new voters’ register.

The move follows the EC’s justification for the need for the country to compile a new voter register for the upcoming December 7 election.

The General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia argued that the EC will only be able to complete compiling a new register by November 8, a month to the election, a development he believes has the propensity to elicit a constitutional crisis.