The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has rejected claims by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) that it is colluding with the Electoral Commission to rig the 2024 elections.
The NDC has accused the EC of skewing the process in the ruling party’s favour, with the latest allegations stemming from the Commission’s directive to its district directors not to allow party agents to monitor with the ongoing vote transfer.
This, the Commission says is due to a clash that occurred in the early hours of Sunday, June 02, 2024, where people sustained injuries from stabbing.
But the NDC, following the announcement says the EC cannot take such a unilateral decision without informing the parties. It has suspected that the decision is a collusion between the EC and the NPP to gerrymander the process.
The NDC has therefore ordered its constituency secretaries to disregard the order and send agents to all the constituencies to monitor the process.
Reacting to the development, Director of elections for the NPP, Evans Nimako, has said in a Citi News interview that the NPP will comply with the directive, adding that the party has won elections under several Commissioners and would win this year’s as well.
“NDC will not depart from this argument that NPP is colluding to rig elections. Elections will be conducted on December 7, 2024, and definitely, the majority of the voters, now numbering about 18.7 million, will vote massively for Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. We won elections in 2016 when Madam Charlotte Osei was EC. We won elections in 2000 and 2004 when Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan was EC and so for us as New Patriotic Party, it doesn’t matter who sits there as the EC boss. We are well represented in all the 38,622 polling stations. And I can assure you that come December 7, the candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia will win massively,” he noted.
He added that they will comply with the EC’s directive and request for copies of the transfers after the exercise to challenge persons they deem not to have appeared in some places.
“For us as the New Patriotic Party, we will comply with the directives by the EC, except that we insist that what is in the act must be real. It does not lay in the map of the NDC to say that irrespective of what the EC has said, we are still going to keep our agents at these centres. In any case, the presence of the agents will not in any way stop a prospective voter who seeks to transfer his or her vote.”
“The issue in there is that parties upon request may be given copies of the transfer list. And then at the stage of the exhibition, parties may challenge through inclusion or exclusion challenges for people who are supposed to be on the electoral role or otherwise but we are confronted with a situation where until the NDC says yes, nothing must happen and this for me is not the way to go,” he lamented.
