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The Electoral Commission has supplied soft copies of the voters register to political parties and the candidates contesting next month’s general elections but the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has alleged that many of the files given to them were corrupted.
 
This year, the EC opted to provide only soft copies of the register to the parties according to the Director of Elections of the NPP, Mr Martin Agyei Mensah Korsah.

The parties were asked to provide external drives for copies of the register to be saved on it for them.

In a radio interview on Neat FM Friday morning, Mr Korsah said when the NPP enquired from the EC why they provided only soft copies and no hard copies as had been done in the past, the response was that some parties did not pick up their copies the last time they [EC] printed hard copies so they decided to cut cost this year.

Mr Korsah said since they don’t have the full register because of the corrupted files, they would have to write to the EC for them to be given a new one.

This development, alongside other issues such as a decision to electronically transmit results without fully briefing all stakeholders on how it would be done according to Mr Korsah, makes him “jittery.”

He said the EC provided the parties with the register without adding other documents such as special voting list, proxy list and absentee list, “none of them was given to us.”

“If everything was in order, would the commission have provided a register without adding all other documents,” he questioned.

“Behind the assurances and hitting the chest”, there are all kinds of cases in court which the commission has no control over, he said.

“It is worrying, we all hope that we will vote on December 7 but the commission would have to put itself together and also be less confrontational by finding a way for solving some of these issues,” Mr Korsah added.

“I’m a bit jittery and why I’m even jittery is the revelation that we will transmit results electronically when stakeholders do not know of the mode of transmission,” he told the host of the show, Akwasi Aboagye.