Supreme Court orders deletion of 56,000 names from Ghana's electoral roll

The Supreme Court ordered here on Tuesday the deletion of some 56,739 names from Ghana's electoral register.

This followed the presentation of the list of 56,739 names by the Electoral Commission (EC) as those found to have used the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Identification(ID) Cards as proof of citizenship to register ahead of the 2012 General Election.

The apex court will also have the Commission delete names of persons who had registered with the NHIS IDs but whose names were not submitted to the Supreme Court.

It said the EC should give adequate notice to all those who will be affected in the deletion exercise to enable them re-register using the appropriate identification procedures.

The five-member panel chaired by the Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood, in a unanimous decision however, shot down the attempt by plaintiffs to challenge the accuracy and credibility of EC's list presented on Thursday.

The Supreme court had ruled in May that the Electoral Commission should expunge from the current voters' register the names of all persons who registered and voted in the 2012 elections, with the NHIS card as a proof of identity.

This was after the court upheld a suit filed by Abu Rahmadan, a former National Youth Organizer of the People's National Convention (PNC), and one, Evans Nimako, in 2014 making illegal the use of NHIS cards as proof of nationality during voter registration.

The court also insisted that the current directive takes precedence over all other activities of the EC. Endit