Kofi Adams, NDC Parliamentary Candidate for Buem constituency
Former National Organiser of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has criticised the Electoral Commission for its move to compile a new biometric voters register.
Like his party, the NDC Parliamentary candidate for Buem in the Oti region described the decision of the EC to change the current voter register as illogical, saying the old register can be cleaned if the EC believes it has names of some persons who are not qualified to be voters in the country.
The EC on Tuesday, December 17, 2019, asked Parliament to approve ¢444,846,663 for the compilation of a new voters’ register prior to the 2020 general election. Their request has been met with fierce opposition from the NDC.
Speaking on Dwaboase on Power 97.9 FM Friday morning, the former spokesperson for ex president Jerry Rawlings argued that the Supreme Court had already ruled on how the register could be cleaned if found to contain names of persons who are ineligible to vote during elections.
Jean Mensah, EC Boss
Mr Adams said if the EC believes the compilation of a new register is borne out of the high rate of manual verification, then new machines ought to be procured to deal with that challenge and not a new register.
“This is a voter register that was used to bring the NPP to government, so why do they [the EC and NPP] think it is not in best shape?” he asked.
To Mr Adams, the excuse by some pro government commentators that new regions have been created and for that matter new codes can only be generated for polling stations in those regions through the compilation of a new register does not make sense.
“If we have new regions the polling stations haven’t changed; they are still existing and even when new ones are added, it won’t change anything….so we need to change the codes in those regions. It is just a matter of programming it to change the regional codes. Its just instructing the computer to do so and there is a software for that, Kofi Adams added.
he said the EC’s posture on the matter was not convincing enough because the same register was used for the District Elections successfully and a previous referendum, making the existing register look intact.
“We have test run it and it worked very well…we don’t fix something that isn’t broken,” he remarked.
NDC Raise Red Flags
Addressing a press conference in Accra on Thursday on the matter, the General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah said the new register must be fiercely resisted since it did not make sense.
“The current voters register was used to successfully elect about 6,600 district assembly members and about 33,000 unit committee members. Yet the Electoral Commission is telling us that the same register cannot be used to elect one person and 275 Members of Parliament.”
“The current register was the one that was used to elect Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP into office,” he added. “we are not complaining. In fact, we are saying that let us use the same register so that given the state of the shenanigans that were played by the NPP in 2016… we will see whether they can win again.”
Source: SmartNewsGh.com
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