The Supreme Court for the second time yesterday, in a unanimous decision, ordered the Electoral Commission (EC) headed by Charlotte Osei to delete the names of the 56,000 persons it (EC) claimed used the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) card as a means of identification to register their names prior to the 2012 elections.
According to the court, the commission must also remove the list of persons who might have used the NHIS card to register but were not captured in the documents submitted to the court.
The EC had said that it would use the exhibition process to delete those names but the court says no way.
In the view of the five-member panel of justices presided over by Chief Justice Georgina Wood, the EC must take immediate steps to delete the said names from the register and give those affected the opportunity to re-register without any hindrance.
The CJ argued that the order was issued pursuant to Article 22 of the Constitution and that the order preceded C.I. 91 – the law on Public Election Regulation 2016.
Justice Wood was emphatic that the electoral body should take steps to implement the court’s May 5, 2016 judgement on the case.
Enforcing Order
Counsel for the plaintiffs, Frank Davies, said they would ensure that the order was carried out to the letter.
Frank Davies says ensuring that the EC adheres to the orders of the Court is key to a credible electoral roll.
“We are going to police and protect this verdict so that Ghanaians will have a reasonably accurate and credible register for the pending elections,” he told Joy FM Tuesday.
Mr Davies said he expected the EC to publish the list of NHIS card holder registrants to aid the process of deleting their names from the electoral register.
He said that would be the reasonable thing to do in order to facilitate the process and adhere to the court’s directive that the deletion is carried out “forthwith.”
“If the EC wants to be fair to Ghanaians, the EC has to display the list of people who registered using the NHIS card,” he said.
On May 5, 2016 the Supreme Court asked the EC to remove from the current voter register names of all persons who registered and voted in the 2012 elections with the NHIS card as proof of identity.
The judgement was subject to varied interpretations, compelling the plaintiffs – Abu Ramadan, a former General Secretary of the People’s National Convention (PNC), and Evans Nimako – to go back to the court for clarification on the May 5 judgement.
The ruling followed a suit filed by the same plaintiffs who in 2014 won a lawsuit that barred the use of the NHIS card for registration.
The electoral body last week Thursday submitted the 56,000 list of persons supposed to have registered with the NHIS card, a list the plaintiff’s lawyers insisted was “spurious, conjured and fictitious.”
Earlier, Frank Davies, who represented the plaintiffs, said numbers 18-55, 751-772, 774-797 and 799-929, being the list of persons who registered with the NHIS card from Afigya Kwabre District in the Ashanti Region, for instance, had no NHIS card numbers.
Again, he contended that some of the lists with numbers had six, 18, 12 and five digits, adding that it was strange that per the list only one person in the Asokwa Ashanti Akyem Central registered with the NHIS card.
According to him, it was puzzling that the list generated from the same source (Form 1A) was full of errors.
Thaddeus Sory, lawyer for the EC, said the list was extracted from Form 1A and that it provided the ID used for the registration.
He insisted that the list was genuine and that it was manually compiled, adding that the mistakes were an oversight on the part of the registration officers who registered the persons.
By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson