Martin Luther Kpebu, a private legal practitioner and social commentator, is calling on the US Ambassador to Ghana, Virginia Evelyn Palmer, to add her voice to the calls for a forensic audit of Ghana’s voters’ register.
According to him, such calls from the international community might resonate with the Electoral Commission (EC) which is bent on carrying the elections without heeding to the calls for an audit of the electoral roll.
Speaking Saturday, September 14, 2024, on TV3’s KeyPoints, the renowned lawyer alleged that the election management body wants to rig the polls, the reason it is refusing to heed to the advice being given by the public to purge the roll of the anomalies discovered in it.
He says the EC wants to take Ghanaians for granted, something the citizenry should not sit aloof and allow to happen.
“I hear John Mahama met the US Ambassador, Virginia Palmer, please Ambassador Palmer, help us. THere must be an independent audit. These guys want to rig this election and we’ll not allow. On Tuesday, Ghanaians, pour out onto the streets, let’s go out and demonstrate. EC cannot take us for granted. Are we kids? You’ve had 8 years, you’ve looted us [and] you [EC] want to help them loot again, another four years. We’ll not allow that to happen, Madam Palmer, please step in. We don’t any ‘D’ (grade), it’s either ‘A’ or you step out.
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.
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