Dispute over bloated voters register: EC is playing smart but…

Deputy General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, Elvis Afriyie Ankrah says the Electoral Commission is only playing smart after officially and persistently denying issuing any CD-ROM containing electoral data to anyone, and then turning round to admit doing so but calling for evidence from the NDC that the alleged bloated Voters Register in its possession came from the EC.

Calling for a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of what he said was a serious, bizarre situation, Elvis said even until Tuesday when the Commission admitted issuing to the NDC a CD-ROM containing electoral data, the EC is not admitting that there were mistakes in the CD they gave out and apologising. “That's not what they are saying, they are playing smart and are saying that well, we gave you a CD-ROM but the information you put out there contradicts what is on our PCs from which the CD-ROM was sourced so we don't know what you are talking about. It raises serious credibility issues.”

Elvis Ankrah who was speaking on Joy FM's Super Morning Show, said the party was taking insinuations from the EC to the effect that the party might have doctored the information it sourced from the EC very seriously and would take a step-by-step approach in unearthing the truth.

Elvis Afriyie Ankrah insisted that when the party received the strange data from the EC, the NDC wrote to the EC for clarification but for two weeks, it never received any response from the EC until the matter came into the public domain.

He maintained that there are some two other individuals who applied for and received the same disputed data from the EC and would call up those individuals to submit their versions from the EC to corroborate the NDC's allegations and challenged the EC to continue to falsely create the impression that the NDC had doctored the document, a charge he said bothered on criminality.

Afriyie Ankrah said given the treatment the EC has subjected the NDC to, the party was not comfortable submitting the CD-ROM to the Commission and then going to sleep. Rather it would submit it only to the committee being set up to investigate the dispute.

Sam Okudjeto Ablakwa of the Committee for Joint Action, who also spoke on the same programme, told host Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah that he had a copies of the disputed data, including a hard copy of the bloated figures also obtained from the EC by the Features Editor of the Palaver newspaper, Ametor Kwame, and maintained that the EC can run but cannot hide from the discrepancies.

“Let it be put on record that at the IPAC meeting yesterday, what the EC tendered as the document for Ashanti Regional Voters' Register, was an aggregation,” and when they were asked for the polling station by polling station records, which translates into constituency total and eventually a regional total, the EC could not readily produce that.

“Why is the EC up to now not able to provide all the polling station by polling station that come together to make constituencies in the Ashanti Region? Why did it fail to do that yesterday at the IPAC meeting and why has it failed since? Let me state clear that if the EC wants to injure the reputation of some of us; because it began this whole thing by lying saying that we did not obtain it properly from them and all that, that has been disproved. If the EC does not come out to say that look; we are a human institution, some things might have gone wrong, it wasn't deliberate, thank you vigilant people for exposing it, let us all put together the truth, let us go into a free and fair and credible elections, then I'm afraid, it is only the EC that can come out worse off in this matter.”

Story: Ike