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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