The association accused the Electoral Commission of disenfranchising students eligible to vote with their handling of the limited voters registration exercise on university campuses nationwide.
There have been complaints about the number of registration centres on the various university campuses through Ghana, leading to lower numbers of students being registered than in previous exercises.
The Commission's 10-day period for the registration exercise is currently set to end on Sunday May 8.
A statement by the USAG said that its calculations found less than 10 percent of the estimated number of young Ghanaian students eligible to vote have been able to so far register.
“If this trend continues, we are afraid it will amount effectively to an administrative decision taken by the EC that has only led to disenfranchising the majority of young Ghanaian students who have come of age to vote. This would be a tragedy against our democracy.”
They said the exercise was not designed to encourage or allow eligible Ghanaians students to register to vote in 2016.
The association claimed that over 100,000 Ghanaian students across campuses up and down the country are facing challenges trying to register.
“This is because the EC has either failed to provide registration centres on some campuses or chosen to not provide adequate registration kits on campus to facilitate the process.
We have had instances where students have had to queue for days without success, whiles having to respond to the natural pressures of revising for exams.”
It said despite the University of Ghana, Legon campus having about 28,000 students on campus of which most are eligible to register, there was only one registration center.
Meanwhile, the Mampong campus of the University of Education has no registration centre on campus. The students have access to a centre inconveniently situated outside of the campus, USAG said.
It was also concerned about the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology which does not have a registration centre on campus.
“There is not a single tertiary institution in Ghana which has not been inconvenienced by the way the EC has chosen to conduct this exercise. Indeed, students are even compelled by the circumstances to conclude that it appears the EC has deliberately done things in this way to discourage them from registering to vote.”
It said the EC should have “positively discriminated” in favour of students and set up more than the usual number of voter registration centres on campuses.
Repeat calls to the EC by Pulse Ghana went unanswered at the time of publication.
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