Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, the Director of Elections for the opposition NDC says during the voter registration exercise, it generated its own register, hence they have detailed reports on the number of names omitted from the Electoral Commission’s new voter register.
According to Afriyie Ankrah, the NDC’s flagbearer was petitioned that some names of their party faithful had been omitted from the new voters’ register. This made John Dramani Mahama call off his campaign in the Bono Region to attend to these matters with urgency.
Speaking to Citi News on Tuesday, Afriyie Ankrah said: “When you have an EC that did not meet with political parties before the exhibition exercise and when you have a register that has been badly compiled, with tens of thousands of names missing from the register, there is no point in being out on the field campaigning. We are going to present him [Mahama] with detailed reports. We have detailed reports from every single region. We will meet with our flagbearer and decide on the next course of action.”
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He continued: “What they [EC] don’t know is that we have generated our own register. We put together daily reports from the registration exercise. In any case, when the [Ashaiman] MP went to check his name on the register, wasn’t the EC there? Did they object then that his name was not in the register? It does not make sense. Why will an MP go to a registration centre, EC officials are there, his name is in the register, and he says his name is not on the register? The EC subsequently picked the MP’s name and picture and published it. That is deceitful.”
Last week, Ernest Henry Norgbey, NDC Member of Parliament for the Ashaiman Constituency accused the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) of excluding over 21,000 names from the register in his constituency, including his, something that was detected during the voter exhibition exercise. The exhibition began on Friday, September 18 and is expected to end on Friday, September 25.
The EC, however, debunked this and emphasized that the lawmaker’s name was captured in the register adding that the figure quoted by the MP was an exaggeration.
Norgbey, who recently demanded information from the EC based on the Right To Information Act, asked the EC to provide the register for him to prove that names of his supporters are missing from the register.
“At the close of the registration, all the political parties were very much aware, including the Electoral Commission in Ashaiman, that we have registered over 167,000 people so where are those 7,000 people,” Norgbe quizzed on TV3 on Sunday, September 20.
“Where are we going to get them? In any case, how did they [EC] manage to get the 14,000 people back on the register.”
The NDC on Monday, September 21, raised similar issues and demanded an extension of the exhibition period.
But its leader, John Dramani Mahama, has weighed into this and is on his way back to Accra to address the media on the issue.
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