National Communications Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi, has said the NDC cannot believe the Electoral Commission’s (EC) claim that all illegal transfers that were made by the Commission have been corrected.
He also says the Commission’s claim that the wrongful transfers in the register only took place at Pusiga cannot be factual since the EC itself has admitted to not having a system in place at the time of the transfers to check such errors.
Benjamin Bannor-Bio, Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission (EC), speaking on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, September 14, 2024, indicated that the Commission did not have the integrity liveliness software to detect such erroneous transfers at the time.
Mr. Bannor-Bio had indicated that the EC has now acquired a modern test software which will help it detect any anomalies with the roll.
But Sammy Gyamfi says the lack of the system to check the anomalies as Mr. Bannor-Bio himself admitted, is a proof that many of such transfers occurred at many places which requires a forensic audit.
According to him, “if a common EC officer could sit in Pusiga, a border town somewhere in the Upper East region, and transfer 38 people from Tamale to Pusiga without the people knowing, can you honestly tell me that that was all they did in terms of those illegal transfers?”
Referring to Mr. Bannor-Bio, he said “he is here telling us that they’ve done their checks, that’s the only place it happened, really? Why should we take your word, why should we believe that that is the only place that those illegal transfers happened because you could not have even detected it because according to your own word, you did not have the system to detect it. You did not have the liveliness system.”
Sammy Gyamfi alleged that such illegal transfers occurred at so many places, citing the Asunafo North constituency where some of such errors have been equally detected.
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.
52-year-old man arrested with Biometric Verification Device belonging to Electoral Commission
