Provide us with final register, NPP demands of EC
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has appealed to the Electoral Commission (EC) to provide the party with the final voters register and accompanying voters list.
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The party has stated that some constituency registers on the soft copy the EC gave it were corrupted.
According to the NPP, the final register ought to include the lists of proxy, transfers, special, as well as absentee voters.
Addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday, Mr Martin Agyei-Korsah, who is the Director of Elections of the NPP, expressed dismay that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Convention People’s Party (CPP) had the full and final list, which included the proxy, transfer, special and absentee voters lists.
“While we commend the Commission for its efforts to deliver the register on time in keeping with the law, we have noticed that the copy given to the NPP is corrupt and incomplete,” Mr Agyei-Korsah declared.
He said the party had officially complained about that and the EC had acknowledged the anomalies and asked the party to wait for the final copy.
According to the law, the EC is supposed to make the final register available to the political parties 21 days before election.
Two weeks
Mr Agyei-Korsah said for close to two weeks, the NPP had been waiting for the final copy.
He said the party was aware that the final list existed and alleged that the EC had given it to the NDC and its district offices.
The NPP Director of Elections stated that there was 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 declared.
Mr Agyei-Korsah said the EC “is deliberately frustrating our programme of a thorough scrutiny of the final voters register and the accompanying lists before the election.”
He explained that the party needed to ascertain whether the right people needed to be on both the final register and accompanying lists were there.
He said it would also enable the party to know whether all the names on the various lists had been extracted from the final register to avoid repetition of names in the lists and the final register.
International practices
Mr Agyei-Korsah said the EC’s action was a major breach of international best practices in ensuring a free, fair, transparent and credible election and that would not be allowed to continue further.
He said in 2012, the NPP did not receive its complete list of the voters register until three days to the election.
In his view, the EC is not only repeating that grave mistake this year; it is discriminating against the NPP in giving the party access to the register.
October 17
He explained that when on October 17 this year the EC wrote to the political parties to bring external drives to pick copies of the register, the NPP complied the next day.
The Director of Elections said it was not until 11 days later after the last IPAC meeting that the party was given a soft copy.
He said the EC had refused to give the party the hard copy version as it used to be the practice for every general election.
Mr Agyei-Korsah said 31 out of the 275 constituencies files given to the party were corrupted, representing 134 polling stations, while the other political parties had not received such corrupt files.
