<<Print>>

Former first lady, Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings, has added has joined calls for a new voters’ register ahead of the 2016 elections.

According to her, there is no need pretending that the voters’ register was not bloated.

Mrs Rawlings, who is the founder of the National Democratic Party (NDP), in an address to the media Thursday said a new voters’ register would serve in the interest of the country as it would ensure a clean and fair election.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) last month argued its position for a new voters’ register after it claimed that it had discovered over 76,000 Togolese nationals on the country’s voters’ register.

The discovery, according to the NPP, was done side by side the Ghana and Togolese voters’ register through the use of a facial biometric recognition technology which had been programmed to identify facial characteristics such as the distances between eyes and ears.

Adding her voice to the calls being made by the NPP and some other political parties, aside the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mrs Rawlings said “I believe that it will serve the interest of Ghana and Ghanaians if the voters’ register is revisited and we all reregister and we weed out all the ghost names and foreign names, see the real potential of the Ghanaian voter and let them vote for who they want. I think it is in our interest as a nation to do that because to pretend like we don’t know that it is bloated and all that, I mean, it’s a fuss.”

Mrs Rawlings also proposed the use of electronic voting as a means of clearing doubts among political parties and the public on the fairness of election results.

“As much as the NDP says that the voters’ register should be cleaned out, we also believe that if it is done and done well for Ghana to have a quick step ahead of the rest of West Africa maybe we should also be looking at electronic voting after we’ve reregistered,” she said.

“… You go to the box, you put your hand on the machine, where you want to vote and it’s counting it for you. No human being will be counting to add anything to any figure. It will be clear for us as a people that this person has won, he has won, and then there will be no discrepancies and so on. We believe that the voters’ register should be looked at again…so that it will be clean, no pink sheets issue… ,” she said.