Convener of Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA), David Asante a pressure group has denied submitting a petition to the Electoral Commission (EC).
The Chairperson of the EC, Mrs Charlotte Osei, addressing journalists on Wednesday, said the LMVCA had already submitted a petition to the commission and hoped that it was not the same petition they were seeking to submit again.
However, speaking in an interview with Kwami Sefa Kayi, David Asante said “we have not taken any petition to the EC…we are yet to submit our petition”.
He also indicated that LMVCA do not intend to create confusion or disrupt the activities of the EC. According to him, “our main intention is to make sure our voices on the need for a new voters register are heard. We never intend forcing the hands of the electoral commission, we respect the verdict from the EC on the need or otherwise for a new voters register. We do not expect to get into any confrontation with any state institution”.
Below is a copy of a statement released by LMVCA addressing various issues raised by the EC Chairperson
Today, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs Charlotte Osei, said to the media that the Let My Vote Count Alliance could simply send a petition "without shouting" about it. She went on to speculate that we had already sent a petition to her.
We wish to place on record that we have not sent any petition to the EC. All the attempts made so far by us to picket and present our petition have been frustrated by the State. We have been pelted with rubber bullets, sprayed with tear gas, bombed with hot water cannons, lashed with horsewhips and battered with batons by the Police all in our efforts to demonstrate to the EC our campaign for a new, credible register.
On her point that we can present a petition quietly and that there is “no need to shout”, it is a matter of opinion. As a former Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education, Mrs Osei, is fully aware that the 1992 Constitution expressly guarantees the right to demonstrate. Article 21(1)(d) of the Constitution grants the “freedom of assembly, including freedom to take part in processions and demonstrations” to every citizen. We hope it is not to suggest that she is against Ghanaians exercising their democratic right to use demonstration as a legitimate means of sending a message to the EC, the body authorised to help give representative meaning to our democracy.
We are aware of the details of today's Inter Party Advisory Committee meeting which took place at the EC and we wish to make a couple of observations.
First, we are concerned by her slow-paced approach to answering the question of whether or not Ghanaians will get a new register for 2016. The Commission, after asking for proposals in August and receiving them in September, has now set the end of October for each of the political parties, including the Freedom Party, to make a thirty-minute oral presentation in support of documents already presented.
We believe this is either an incompetent and superfluous manner of going about dealing with this most important issue or simply a deliberate tactic on the part of the EC to delay taking a decision so that by the time it finally takes one we might all find it practically too late to begin the actual process of getting a new register.
On September 22, the various political parties presented their proposals to the EC as part of the process of answering once and for all the big question of whether or not to compile a completely new voters’ register. It should not take another one month for the EC to receive their presentations in both oral and written forms, for the EC to begin the process of considering them. What stopped the EC from fixing next week as the date for the parties to speak on documents they have already submitted?
It is our submission that if the EC were truly serious about this matter it would tackle it with apparent urgency. The EC appears to be buying time. It appears indecisive. We expect the new chair to show a far stronger and decisive leadership than we are so far seeing.
The EC need not stretch taking a decision on this matter beyond October 2015. The preparation for compiling a new, biometric register requires that we take an informed decision very soon. And, the country cannot go on in this environment of uncertainties. The EC must act and act decisively based on the strength of the credible evidence available and that evidence only points to one direction, a new register.
It has been a long battle trying to get the Electoral Commission to do something about the electoral roll. To repeat what we said at yesterday's news conference, this is a battle worth fighting for and there is no desire on the part of all the protagonists to give up on this fight.
It is a battle that we can confidently say is supported by the majority of Ghanaians. We are informed, for instance, that some 15 political parties sent proposals and at least 6 of them, including the NDP, CPP, PPP, UPP and NPP, have officially called for a new register. We are encouraged by this.
In our view, it is not necessarily the number of political parties that say ‘yes’ to a new register that should determine whether or not Ghana has a new, credible register. What matters is the weight of evidence against the dubious credibility of the existing register and the benefit to our democracy from replacing it with one that can stand the test of scrutiny, meet international standards and can, therefore, command the confidence of the Ghanaian people. This is not a matter of how many members of IPAC are prepared to agree but how substantially flawed or not the current electoral roll may be.
We will urge the EC Chairperson to focus more on the evidence before her and deal with the matters before her with the requisite urgency.
For instance, months after the EC came out to inform political parties that after the limited registration it undertook de-duplication to clean up the register, the NPP came out last week, from just analyzing a sample of the updated register supplied to it by the EC, to show that it has been able to pull out over 2,000 more cases of multiple registrations. For any credible biometric database, multiple registration is supposed to be one of the easiest things to detect. The fact that every round of exercise of the same database comes up with more evidence of multiple registrations should only mean one or two things: that either the register is not credible and/or the people in charge of the database are not credible.
The EC under Dr Kwadwo Afare-Gyan had a chronic phobia against accountability and transparency. We hope Mrs Charlotte Osei's EC will be different and we are confident that she has it within her to make a difference.
We are told the EC has commissioned an international body to interrogate the evidence that the NPP presented against the current register. This is a positive move and we commend Mrs Charlotte Osei, accordingly. The EC, however, has not been prepared to make any further disclosures over this and when it expects results. The people of Ghana expect and deserve greater transparency on this. The independence of the Commission should not be stretched to mean independence from accountability. The body is accountable to Ghanaians and must begin showing that more.
We are also informed that the EC does not want to allow polling station agents to be added to the list of Special Voters. This would be a serious blow to the push for credible polls in 2016 and we will revisit this matter in detail later on.
We are, nevertheless, happy to hear that the Commission intends to allow certified journalists to be on the Special Voting List so that they can vote on an earlier day to help their nationwide deployment to cover the election.
It would be a big blow to the push for vigilance in 2016 if the EC limits political parties to selecting their polling agents from an electoral area for fear of losing the votes of the agents.
If the Supreme Court believes that party agents are as relevant or even more so than Presiding Officers then let them be at least allowed to also vote at an earlier date. This allows the parties and candidates to have the flexibility of selecting wide and deploying wide their best agents across the country.
We will end by reminding Mrs Osei that LMVCA and its partners are yet to deliver their petition the way they have chosen to do so, which is through picketing and petitioning. If she is uncomfortable about a demonstration then we wish to advise her that it could be worse if we end up with a disputed election on our hands in 2016.
We will urge the new Chairperson of the EC to handle this critical matter of the voters’ register with the necessary care, attention, urgency and understanding.
The prayers of an entire nation are with her and we wish she will have the courage, wisdom and patriotism to do what is just and right for our democracy.
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