The Collation of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), has\u00a0said\u00a0some political party agents monitoring the ongoing limited voters\u2019 registration exercise have been abusing the challenge procedure.<\/p>\n
The Electoral Commission\u2019s limited voters\u2019 registration exercise took off nationwide on Thursday April 28, and it is expected to register 1.2 million voters\u00a0who have turned 18, as well as prospective first time voters.<\/p>\n
But CODEO says\u00a0the instances where\u00a0party agents abused the challenge procedure on the first day of the exercise, may discourage some prospective\u00a0voters from\u00a0partaking in the exercise.<\/p>\n
They cited a particular polling station in the Eastern Region that had about 20\u00a0registrants challenged by party agents of the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party.<\/p>\n
According to CODEO, reports indicate that the party agents may have been abusing the challenge procedure just to outdo each other.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Eyewitness News<\/strong>, a research officer with CODEO, Rhoda Afful, said, \u201cYou realize the parties are now more or less trying to outdo each other in terms of raising challenge accusations against registrants. This is something we are quite worried about; that some qualified people could be turned away because of this situation that we are having at the registration centers.\u201d<\/p>\n Mrs. Afful\u00a0noted that there could be justifiable reasons for party agents using the challenge procedure but things get worryingly out of hand when they are done with ill-motives.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is quite alright for a party agent to raise a challenge against somebody. The rules allow it. But in an instance where you have almost all registrants, 20 of them being challenged by a political party sort of in a playful manner, I\u00a0think it is quite worrying and something we need to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n “The way we do it, is something that we need to be careful with so that we don\u2019t unnecessarily turn people away from the centres,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n She has thus called on the political parties to caution their polling agents against abusing the challenge procedure.<\/p>\n Despite this hiccup, CODEO said the first day of the exercise was generally successful.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Delali Adogla-Bessa\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Collation of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), has\u00a0said\u00a0some political party agents monitoring the ongoing limited voters\u2019 registration exercise have been abusing the challenge procedure. The Electoral Commission\u2019s limited voters\u2019 registration exercise took off nationwide on Thursday April 28, and it is expected to register 1.2 million voters\u00a0who have turned 18, as well as prospective first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":209959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slider-1","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/209959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}