THE opposition New Patriotic Party has accused the Electoral Commission of discrimination and acting in bad faith in the way and manner it is dealing with the party, especially with regards to having access to the final lists of the voters register.
“For close to 2 weeks, we still continue to wait for these lists. These lists exist and we are aware the Commission has passed them on to our major opponent, the NDC, and also all its district offices," the party said at press conference yesterday.
Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, NPP Director of Elections, said the EC had exposed it biases against the party, having served the NDC and the CPP with the full list of the voters register.
"The Commission has refused to give us a hard copy version, as used to be the practice for every general election. So we ask: for which political parties was the EC printing copies of the register over the last couple of weeks?" the party queried.
The NPP lambasted the EC for deliberately slowing down the electoral process, which is casting doubt on the readiness of the commission to hold the election on December 7.
Even after the undue delays in giving out the full list, the party said the copy it received was corrupted and incomplete.
According to the party, after the commission, in October, wrote to all parties to bring external drives to pick their copies of the register, it took the it eleven days to furnish them with a soft copy of the list, even when “the NPP complied with it the very next day” whereas other parties like the governing NDC had theirs immediately they submitted theirs.
The party said with the soft copy, 31 out of the 275 constituency files given them, which represents 134 polling stations, were corrupted, adding that “the CPP tells us they have suffered no such corrupt files.”
According to the NPP, the EC has clearly failed in its important constitutional responsibility to be impartial, fair and transparent as far as the processes leading to the upcoming elections are concerned.
The party recalled that in 2012 it only got access to the complete list of the voters' register just three days before December 7, wondering why the Commission is not only repeating that grave mistake this year but also discriminating against the party to have access to the register.
The voters register, according to the NPP, should contain the Proxy List, Transfer List, Special Voters List and Absentee Voters List.
According to the party, "the version given to the New Patriotic Party had none of the above lists. We have officially complained about this to the EC, which has acknowledged this anomaly but is only telling us to wait. We know for a fact that the ruling National Democratic Congress has the full and final list, including the Proxy List, Transfer List, Special Voters List and Absentee Voters List."
Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah accused the EC of deliberately frustrating the NPP’s programme “of a thorough scrutiny of the final voters register and the accompanying lists before the election.”
He explained that the EC had virtually denied the party the opportunity to ascertain whether the right people needed to be on both the final register and the accompanying lists are indeed those there, and also whether all names on the various lists have been extracted from the final register to avoid repetition of names in the lists and final register.
To the NPP, what the commission is doing is not leading it in ensuring free, fair, transparent and credible election, warning that the party would not sit unconcerned to allow this act of injustices to go on.
On the proxy list, the party again registered its disgust at the decision by the commission to completely ignore the the regulations guiding its compilation, and the attempt to inflate the figures.
“We took daily count of all proxy applications within the district offices of the Electoral Commission nationwide and can report that in all the 10 regions, a total of 378 proxy applications were received and approved,” the party’s Director of Elections alleged.
The NPP also said so far, it has no idea of how many people were registered abroad and who they are.