A register in our schooling days recorded the names of children in a class. To know the number of children in a school, you had to examine the class registers. There was nothing like a school register. Rather, there were a number of registers that would together tell you the number of pupils in a school. The head-teacher keeps all the class registers in her or his office. But there is nothing like a school register. At the national level, we even talk ‘enrolment statistics’ and never a national school register.
For an election register, it would have been simple to follow this centripetal (bottom-up) model. What is called a national register ought to have been a compendium of polling station registers.
It should not be the centrifugal (top-down) national register which is broken up into polling station registers.
I am saying all this because slowly and incrementally, the election register seems shaped as an undesired instrument of doom. Instead of being designed for democratic right to choose who leads my compatriots, the motherland voter register rather threatens to institutionalise election stealing. Flawed, it would likely breed all other election flaws. As learnt from an election petition proceeding, congress works through any and every conceivable way to get a register which has far more names than real people’s names. It goes by ‘let’s pack it and load it as much as we can because therein lies the opportunity to steal.’ Such is what came to pass in year 2012.
It is happening all over in 2016. Just over 69 days to an election (as I write), there is no register. Yet if my polling station was to compile its register, one week should suffice. A register pronounced not ‘accurate and credible enough’ has been hanging since whenever.
It is still being worked on. In my view, all that cannot be done is being done to create stealing loopholes while pretending to produce a more accurate and credible one.
Take the delete and undelete NHIS card registrants. So far, no one knows how who registered with that card was determined.
They kept playing games, including semantic acrobatics, with the meaning of delete. Without pre-registration card identification it can only be falsehood in producing a post-registration list.
With the limited registration, congresspeople, mainly the former corrupt student leader type, worked so hard, as always, to disenfranchise university students.
In cahoots with the registering authority, they ensured students would be denied the opportunity of registering by choosing between writing their examination papers or registering to vote; thus automatically excluding them from the voters’ list.
There’s usually a small group of people who vote transfer. In 2012, I saw buses offloading people at an Adenta polling station. Now I know it was the work of voter transfer.
I doubt if many of my compatriots cared about proxy voting before. Uncharacteristically, it has become a big issue not because anything was going to be done about it in terms of plugging stealing holes but because it is also now exposed as packing the register as a stealing trick.
Sadly, very sadly, when compatriots of LMVC sought a new register (they predicted rightly no amount of cleaning will amount to anything of substantive accuracy, credibility and integrity cleaning), a police chief clamourer oversaw a compatriot’s eye being removed by a bullet.
A sadist so-called election chief commissioner cheered on the side shouting: ‘deal with the noisemakers.’
Given such register riddled with inaccuracies and devoid of credibility, we learn from court proceedings that it is the principal enabler of election fraud: in forged special voting results, multiple ballot casting, extra pink-sheeting and the creation of non-existent polling stations.
It allows transposition of figures such that 17,000 can be written as seven thousand in words and figures and 270 written as 27 zero. It enables overvoting, disingenuously translated as ballot stuffing, and ballot spoiling to suit congress’ convenience.
The inaccurate register is fodder for the result transportation process: from polling station to constituency to district to region before the national. One is even unsure about the national and the announced. The flawed register also encourages bribing EC officials, polling agents and ends up turning into a monster, a paper Frankenstein that would devour its creator by fomenting conflagration.
The forged figures will enter the binary computer count as garbage in.
Whether anyone will be able to convince a ‘go to court’ preacherman that, indeed, the out is garbage, is not likely. So let the brains set working to prove that any garbage in will be out as garbage because what went in was garbage. Not accurate, nor credible enough, the stage is set for election stealing. Twaso may not replace toaso to halt incompetence reigning for a long, long time, unless flaws of leakages are blocked tight.
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