Private legal practitioner, Martin Luther Kpebu, has said the Electoral Commission is one of the institutions that must be reconstituted when a new government takes over in 2025.
He says the Commission has been compromised with party foot soldiers whose actions ahead of the December elections, he alleges, smacks rigging.
Speaking on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, September 14, 2024, Mr. Kpebu said organising a demonstration for the reconstitution of the EC will be one of the first things he will champion if another government takes over from the NPP.
The renowned lawyer, referring to some comments and admissions made by the Director of Elections at the Commission, Benjamin Bannor-Bio, who was also on the show, that the Commission did not have the liveliness system to check the illegal transfers at the time the EC was doing the votes transfer expressed shock that the EC official said his outfit will not exhibit the roll again after correcting the said errors.
Addressing the EC Director, Martin Kpebu scored the Commission’s performance a ‘D’, saying it is nothing to write home about.
“Mr. Bio, you’ve really exemplified what ‘D’ looks like in life here today. That’s how a performance of ‘D’ looks like. Sammy Gyamfi has been very clear, he’s been able to articulate his point and he’s won heads and shoulders over you.
“I’ve told you, this EC is a bunch of incompetence. When we have a new government the first demonstration we will be doing will be for us to reconstitute the EC. You can’t put party foot soldiers there and then they’ll give you a D performance like this. How can you say this register, you’ll not exhibit it again?
“Let me tell you Mr. Bio, based on all the problems the NDC has identified, you have no option but to to this independent audit,” he stated.
Mr. Kpebu’s comments follow the NDC’s call on the EC to conduct a forensic audit of the roll to correct some errors it has detected following the exhibition of the register.
The NDC, since the exhibition of the voters’ register, has petitioned the EC to conduct a forensic audit of the roll, citing several errors it detected from the register during the exhibition process.
Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission (EC) has said the call by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for an independent forensic audit of the voters register was “misguided” and “premature”.
It said the discrepancies the NDC has talked about and had a meeting with EC over it, were not “new” as the Commission itself had detected same issues and has taken steps to resolve them.
According to the EC, the law provides remedies for such discrepancies to be corrected under the Constitutional Instrument for registration of voters, C.I. 91, which has been updated by C.I. 126, and that the law envisaged that discrepancies may arise following a registration exercise and therefore provided remedies for fixing them.
Such remedies the Commission said includes omitted names, objection to names of unqualified voters, removal of names of deceased persons from the register, replacement of poor quality or damaged voter ID cards, correction to wrong spelling of names, correction to wrong registration centre codes and misplaced polling stations and amendment to other registration details, example age, sex etc as a result of clerical error.
The EC said this at a media engagement Thursday, September 12, 2024, dubbed, “Let the Citizens know” where the Commission addressed the nation on matters arising from the exhibition of the provisional voters register.
The NDC has since planned on a protest on September 17 to demand the EC to conduct the audit.
But speaking on behalf of the Commission, Samuel Tettey, Deputy Commissioner in charge of Operations said the planned street protest by the NDC was not the way to resolve the issue.
According to him, the EC has asked the NDC multiple times to provide data on the discrepancies it said it had found so the EC can compare it to what it has also found as part of the public exhibition process and was already working on resolving it, but the NDC has not done so.
