The Electoral Commission (EC) has insisted that its decision to make the Ghana Card the sole document for the registration of voters remains unchanged.
It explained that officials of the National Identification Authority (NIA) had so far captured about 17 million Ghanaians into its system after the EC had met them and backlog of 400,000 of them were yet to receive their card after registration.
“We met the NIA officials about two weeks ago and per the statistics, they have covered more than 17 million Ghanaians and the backlog now is about 400,000 persons who are yet to receive their cards after being registered,” EC disclosed.
Dr Serebour Quaicoe, the Director of Electoral Services at the EC, explained that some of the district offices were empty now because officials of NIA had registered everyone in the district.
“I can tell you on authority some of the district offices of NIA have been closed because people in those districts have been registered and people are no more complaining about the issuance of the card and we have two more years to go so we are still standing by our earlier position,” he noted.
Dr Quaicoe’s comment comes on the back of a directive from the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin for EC to forget laying the new Constitutional Instrument (C.I) in Parliament if they fail to meet the leadership of the House.
According to him, the Commission had no knowledge of a directive from the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, directing it and officials of NIA to appear before him with a briefing over the new C.I seeking to make the Ghana Card the sole document for the registration of voters ID since EC does not operate with hearsay.
“If indeed the Speaker has issues with the processes, he must officially write to the Commission but in the view of EC, it cannot honour the Speaker’s request when they have not been officially invited.
“We have not heard anything from Mr Bagbin because officially he has to write to us if they have issues with our C.I but we have no letter from Parliament and we do not work with hearsay and we have already met the Subsidiary and Budget Committees of Parliament but nobody has invited us because we can only go to the House when we have been invited and you cannot go to somebody’s house without invitation,” Dr Quaicoe maintained.
