The New Patriotic Party (NPP) suspects a grand
scheme by the Electoral Commission (EC) not to provide a level playing field for
the December 7 general election.At a press conference in Accra
yesterday, Director of Elections of the party, Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, gave
varied reasons why they suspect foul play on the part of the elections
organizing body.
Key among them, he said, was the commission’s refusal to
give the party a hard copy version of the voter register as has often been the
practice for every general election.
He indicated that 31 out of the 275
constituency files in the form of soft copy of the voter register given to the
NPP were all corrupted.
Even those, he said, did not include the list of
proxy, transfer, special and absentee voters’ lists.
According to him,
all their complaints to the EC for the past two weeks had fallen on deaf ears as
the commission had still not shown any sign of good
faith.
Concerns
Martin claimed that the EC had
released all the lists to not only the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC)
which is the NPP’s main contender in the elections, but also the other political
parties and therefore, wondered why the elections organizing body had refused to
give his party the same documents – if it’s not part of a grand scheme to
frustrate the efforts of the NPP leadership.
“There is no legitimate
reason for the EC to discriminate against the NPP. It shows bad faith and it
shows that the EC has failed in its important constitutional responsibility to
be impartial, fair and transparent,” he stated.
His reason was that “The
NDC has admitted publicly that it has the final list. The CPP also admits to
have been given the final list. The EC admits that it has not given us the final
list.”
“The EC is deliberately frustrating our programme of a thorough
scrutiny of the final voter register and the accompanying lists before the
elections. We need 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. We are
being denied all these,” he emphasized.
The NPP Director of Elections
also raised concern about the proxy voters’ list saying, “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” with the breakdown as follows : Greater
Accra – 98, Brong Ahafo – 38, Western – 43, Upper West – 03, Eastern – 36, Volta
– 12, Northern – 04, Upper East – 01, Central – 37 and Ashanti –
106.
Suspicion
Meanwhile, according to Mr Martin
Adjei-Mensah Korsah, “Available data which has been pushed to the commission’s
district offices as final proxy list and which the commission has refused to
serve the NPP with copies, indicates that these figures have changed”, saying
“the EC must explain this.” |
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