Elections and borderlands in Ghana

Abstract

In the nationwide debates in the build-up to the Ghana elections of December 2016, the New Patriotic Party, then in the opposition, claimed that 76,000 individuals were registered on both the Togolese and the Ghanaian voters' registers, casting doubt on the citizenship status of voters who crossed the border from Togo to vote in Ghana. The issues that political parties continually raise about the voters' register result in recurrent debates about identification documents and belonging. This article poses the underlying questions that many election analyses overlook: Who is the electorate? Who decides who belongs to the nation? I argue that the criteria for belonging are neither those that are set in the law, nor those that seem to be suggested by political parties, but those that are decided at a local level where communities are the real gatekeepers of the vote. This article contributes to the literature on elections in Africa by highlighting the porosity of borders in a mobile world, not purely in terms of electoral outcomes, but in terms of broader issues about citizenship and belonging.