Unlike the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) says it will go with the directive of the Electoral Commission (EC) not to deploy its agents to monitor the ongoing vote transfer exercise.
The Commission has directed its Regional Directors to inform caretakers of all the constituencies not to allow the party agents at the offices 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.
Meanwhile, the Director of elections for the NPP, Evans Nimako, has said his outfit will comply with the directive by the elections management body.
“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,” he told Citi News Monday, June 03, 2024.
He stated that the party may request for the list after the exercise to challenge persons they deem not to have been at some constituencies.
“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.
Vote transfer exercise: EC’s directive to exclude political parties illegal – Omane Boamah
