The Deputy Director of Elections and IT for the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Dr. Rashid Tanko-Computer, has said that “there are no errors in elections” and that “every error is a calculated attempt to rig an election.”
According to him, if vigilance is not in place to fish out such anomalies, they will slide to aid the rigging of the polls on the day of election.
His comments come on the back of some errors detected in the provisional voters’ register which the Electoral Commission (EC) put our for exhibition in August.
The NDC had raised issues about the register saying it has been bloated. It issued a statement demanding the Commission to explain to the public how those anomalies came about.
At a press conference in Accra Monday, September 02, 2024, the Deputy Chairman of the Electoral Commission in charge of Corporate Services, Dr. Eric Bossman Asare, admitted that indeed there were some errors in the register.
“Preliminary investigations by the Commission have revealed that voter transfers were indeed effected for Thirty-Eight (38) individuals using the credentials of an Electoral Commission Official. The records of those transfers are captured in the Voter Management System’s (VMS) audit logs. A look at the verification done during the transfer process shows that photos of the voters from their Voter ID Cards were used for facial verification and to effect the transfer,” he disclosed.
He, however, dismissed the claim that those were aimed at rigging the elections for a particular party. He said the final register which the Commission will provide will address all the issues.
“It is also absolutely untrue that the Commission has added names to the Voters Register in a bid to rig the elections for a particular party. Those allegations are without merit and should be disregarded by the Public. The EC has no intention of bloating the register to give any political party advantage over the other,” Dr. Asare added.
READ ALSO: Full text: Address by Dep. Chair of EC on Voters’ Register Exhibition on Sept 2
But reacting to the issue on Ghana Tonight with Alfred Ocansey Monday, September 02, Dr. Tanko-Computer indicated that “if you catch them, they say it’s a mistake, when you don’t catch them it will pass. If we hadn’t raise the issues, they were going to be silent.”
He questioned the integrity of the IT system of the Electoral Commission (EC) asking how it could not prompt the Commission on the astronomic increase in relation to the number of people that were supposed to be added from the transfers.
“So, it means their IT system is bereft of ideas that you are adding figures you don’t know the number that you are adding, you don’t know the number of people that you’ve registered, don’t you know the number of people you have transferred? So. when you are putting up the figures together and you see that the numbers are increasing astronomically, won’t it trigger something that something is wrong with the figure before you print them out?” he questioned.
NDC must be congratulated for defending Ghana’s democracy – Tanko-Computer
