I WON'T VOTE - SAYS AFARI-GYAN

Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Thursday December 6, 2012.

The Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, has said he won’t vote tomorrow when Ghana goes to the polls to elect a president and parliamentarians.

Dr Afari-Gyan made this known when he met journalists at the Ghana International Press Centre in Accra yesterday, in what looked like a major press conference before tomorrow’s elections.

When he was asked if he would personally vote, Dr. Afari-Gyan said, “I don’t vote because all the candidates are my brothers. I am a registered voter but as a matter of principle, I have decided not to vote. Maybe, in my private life, I might vote.”

Dr Afari-Gyan stated that all was set for the crucial presidential and parliamentary elections tomorrow and promised to supervise a clean process.

“All the materials are already in the field and we are ready to conduct the election on Friday,” he stated.

He said the problems encountered in the early voting by the security agencies would not affect the national exercise on Friday.

He explained that the EC had to select the names of personnel of the security agencies from the main register for the special voting and the refusal by some of the agencies to supply the commission with the relevant information led to the hiccups.

“The situation will be different on Friday because all the information is there. We encountered hitches in the early voting because we had to compile their names from the entire data.

“We can say that we have a very robust system and the machines are ready for the job. The processing time is not as long as some people are saying. You don’t have to spend so much time in the process.

“We are confident that even our largest polling stations can contain the situation. It is only about 2,000 out of the 26,000 polling stations nationwide that have figures that will go beyond 1,100 voters. All the rest are below 1,000, therefore there should not be a problem about time spent for going through the process,” he stated.

“Everybody has to be verified biometrically before voting and we have agreed on this with all the parties,” he said, adding, “People who lose their ID cards can also vote.”

Dr. Afari-Gyan stated that the biometric machine was capable of identifying the total number of verified voters and reiterated that if the number of ballots exceeded the number of verifications, the commission would have no option but to cancel the process.

He underscored the need for the parties to pay particular attention to their agents since he said they would be critical to the whole process.

“Don’t pull off your agents or ask them not to sign the results because their refusal to sign does not make the results invalid,” he stressed.

He said he would be the craziest person to tamper with results that had already been seen by everybody at the constituency level and told the politicians that “most of the elections officials can’t help you to win elections”.

“The parties must have credible agents. In elections, we use brain power and not muscle power,” he emphasised.

He said the EC could not do anything to people who refused to leave the polling stations after casting their ballot if they were not within the defined perimeter.