IT Consultant to the Electoral Commission, Yaw Ofori justifies plans for new voters’ register and electoral equipment ahead of 2020 polls.

He spoke on the Citi Breakfast Show with Bernard Avle.

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Bernard Avle interviews Dr. Bossman Asare, the deputy chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana on issues related to the new voters’ register.

In this interview, Bernard sought to know whether Ghana needed a new voters’ register or not.

Some political parties and civil society organizations believe that Ghana does not need a new register. The EC has also been accused of not engaging key stakeholders appropriate but Dr. Bossman Asare says the EC is ready to engage political parties opposing new voters’ register.

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Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue, Mr. Casley-Hayford said: “My theory is that, over the years, the NDC had started, even as far back as Jerry Rawling’s time, manipulating the voters’ register.”

The member of pressure group, Occupy Ghana, revealed that he gathered this information from his “private correspondence” adding that he could “prove it statistically.”

According to him, the “extra numbers that were on the voters’ register and that have been on the voters’ register for decades, were all padded numbers.”

“This is where I believe sincerely that the NDC deceived themselves into thinking that they had those million plus votes,” he added.

Sydney Casley-Hayford said the fact that the NDC won the 2008 elections while the party was out of power, did not necessarily mean they could not have manipulated the register.

“The fact that you are not in power does not mean you cant have somebody who is in a position to change numbers that the people in power don’t know about. If I have a deep throat somewhere in the Electoral Commission who is influential enough and can manipulate numbers well enough, he can do that without the party necessarily being in power.”

He was also livid over what he called the NDC’s constant deception of the citizenry, even after losing the 2016 general elections.

“ I think that the NDC after so many decades of running this country has started believing their own lies. For a long time they kept trumpeting their success stories and we would refuse to listen to whole facts. Even at the time when the economy was slipping and many people were venting, they still wanted you to believe that everything was fine. When they went to the IMF and we commented, they still wouldn’t listen.”

Ahead of the elections, Abu Ramadan and one Evans Nimako went to the Supreme Court to seek an interpretation of the court’s earlier ruling on the validity of the voters’ register.

The Supreme Court subsequently ordered the Electoral Commission to with immediate effect remove the names of about 56,000 people who registered with NHIA cards as proof of Ghanaian citizenship, ahead of the 2012 elections.

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By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @EfeAnsah

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According to the party, they were given a soft copy which has some files damaged.

[contextly_sidebar id=”jg38CxUmituh2OK3XUG7HGnNakiZX8J6″]“In this country, whenever we are going for elections, the commission provides political parties with registers both in hard and soft copy, this year they said they were unable to give us the hard copy, why because all the political parties took their copies when they were printed the last time. We can’t answer whether this is a good reason to deny us hard copies of the register, meanwhile in your budget presented to fund this election; provision has been made for you to present this to us in hard copy,” Director of elections for the NPP, Martin Adjei Mensah Korsah said on Eyewitness News.

The Electoral Commission furnished the political parties with the soft copy of the electoral roll last week, at an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting.

But speaking on Eyewitness News, Mr. Korsah said they have asked the EC to furnish them with an update of the damaged files.

“What was given to us as a register, we have some files already corrupted which cannot even be opened; so we had to write another letter requesting from the Commission to furnish us with those problem areas,” he complained.

He also said the list they were given was incomplete, because it came without the voter transfer list,special voting list among others.

“You gave us the register just some few days ago without the relevant list – there is proxy list, transfer list, special voter’s list among others, we are having to go back to the Commission to get that from them. That shouldn’t be the case. If the register is complete, it comes with those other lists automatically,” he argued.

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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin

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