The Electoral Commission (EC) says it has concluded its internal investigation into the National Democratic Congress (NDC)’s allegations of illegal vote transfers and has found no merit in the opposition party’s claims. The NDC had been calling for a forensic audit of the voter register.
According to the NDC’s Deputy Director of Elections and IT, Dr Tanko Rashid-Computer, the party believes the voter register has been tampered with, leading to inflation and inaccuracies.
He also expressed concerns regarding the loss of the Biometric Verification Devices (BVD) and Biometric Voter Register (BVR).
“When we went to meet the Electoral Commission on Friday, the security checks they subjected us to before entering the hall were enough to indicate that if your attack dog refuses to bark at someone stealing from you, you should start questioning it. When this happened and we sent the questionnaire, the EC initially denied it.”
According to the Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission (EC), Benjamin Bano-Bio the commission directed its IT department to investigate the NDC’s claims and found them to be baseless.
He said that there were not 15,000 illegal vote transfers, as was suggested during the NDC’s press briefing.
Mr Bano-Bio noted that the issue occurred in Pusiga, and due to the system’s built-in accountability, the EC was able to trace the problem, determine how it happened, and reverse all 38 transfers that were detected.
“We did not stop there. We tasked our IT team to go through all the detected transfers to determine if such a situation occurred across the country. We have not found any other cases in this regard.”
The Electoral Commission (EC) said that it will open its offices across the country on Tuesday, September 17, despite the NDC plan to hold demonstrations at these locations.
The Director of Electoral Services at the EC, Benjamin Bano-Bio noted that the commission expects the NDC to ensure its members remain peaceful during the protest.
“As a party they have the right demonstrate, if you have issues and they want to present to our office, we have no problem. We would accept them but we want to encourage to ensure that civility prevails so that it does not turn out into something”.
The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) said the demonstration of the NDC is much ado about nothing, pressing the NDC to instead collaborate with the EC to resolve their challenges instead of war mongering.
Director of Election and Research of the NPP, Evans Nimako said that for the NDC that has been the modulus to test the system to see if that is what is actually happening.
“I am saying that where we have been given the register and printed it out to our people to go out and monitor it at the polling station, our focus is to reach out to as many voters as possible and ensure that, on D-Day, December 7, the majority of them turn out to vote for Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.”
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