Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com
By William Yaw Owusu
Friday, 06 November 2015
The New Patriotic Party branch
in the United States of America (NPP-USA) says it has unravelled what it claims
to be ‘Voter Register Tricks’ perpetrated by the ruling National Democratic
Congress (NDC) with tacit support from the Electoral Commission (EC).
Currently, there is a heated
debate about whether or not the EC should compile a new Biometric Voters’ Register
(BVR) after all stakeholders, including political parties and the commission
itself, admitted that the document used for the controversial 2012 general
elections is bloated.
However, the two major parties
(NDC and NPP) are sharply divided over the procedure for a register before the
crucial 2016 elections, with the EC virtually siding with the NDC’s position
that the register be cleaned rather than compile a new one as the NPP has
proposed.
The EC has also said strangely
that mounting equipment all over Ghana for a new register is a recipe for chaos.
A news release issued by the Public
Relations Committee of NPP-USA said “in order to undertake Election Day fraud
and manipulate the election results, the Electoral Commission, at the instance
of the NDC, starts with bloating the voters’ register with fake names,
foreigners and minors, using the electronic medium.”
The statement said “any attempt
by the NPP to unravel this fraud machine meets stiff resistance from the EC and
its alter ego, the NDC. A discussion of some of their tricks and traps even
before the election itself will help us to understand the dangers ahead for
Ghana.”
PDF vrs CSV File
“The EC deliberately produces
garbage of information and data in a portable document format (PDF) file and/or
a paper copy of the PDF file. They deliberately refuse to produce a comma
separated values (CSV) file which allows data to be saved in a table structure
format, and enables queries and management of the data for verification and
decision-making purposes,” they claimed.
The NPP-USA further claimed that
despite repeated requests from the NPP, the EC had “refused to produce the CSV
file,” adding, “without the CSV file no valuable information can be obtained
for the election.
“NPP and the other parties
cannot know the accuracy, validity, completeness and reliability of the voters’
register as presented in the PDF file by the EC. Thus, the EC deliberately
shirks its responsibility of producing a credible register by producing garbage
and useless information which they call a voters’ register.”
Serious Audit
They said that “no serious
review, audit, update, or revision of the voters’ register can happen without
issuing a CSV file to all interested parties to enable them know the starting
point of where we are with the register.”
“The CSV file will let us know
how many voters are in each polling station, their identity, ages, sexes, ID
numbers, etc. The same information can be obtained for each constituency, region
and the nation as a whole,” they insisted, adding, “We wish to remind you also
that the EC has not produced statistics of the voters' register as a whole by
nation, by region, by constituency, by polling station, by sex and by age. This
is no accident. It is a lie of omission in order to perpetrate the fraud of
bloating the register.”
Audited Register?
The NPP-USA claimed that the
EC’s understanding and definition of an audit “is a blatant lie,” adding, “the
EC wants to pull the wool over the eyes of the Ghanaian public by kicking part
of their responsibility of making the
final decision off to so-called professionals or experts to ‘Audit’ the voters’
register.”
They described the kind of audit the EC
intends to do as ‘kangaroo exercise”, adding that “No one should accept the
fraudulent exercise that the EC wants to undertake against the interests of
Ghanaians. It is a sham exercise and must be stopped.”
More Polling Stations
The NPP-USA said that the EC had
said it was increasing the number of polling stations from 26,000 to 30,000
without creating a completely new voters’ register, asking, “How does one
assign the old voters to a new polling station and obtain the consent and
approval of the old voter?”
According to them, “the EC wants
to undertake the herculean task of reviewing a voters’ register of 14.7 million
names and deleting names based on information that is discretionary and open to
abuse and fraud.
“No amount of expertise, however
genuine, honest and accomplished, can convince the Ghanaian public of the
integrity of their work. It will be a
sham and a farce that Ghanaians need not go through.”
NPP-USA stressed that “We remain
convinced that only a new voters’ register can lead to a peaceful, nonviolent,
worry-free, fair and transparent elections in 2016. The wishes of the people of
Ghana, their hopes and aspirations can challenge all contrary forces, even if
those forces are backed by security and military personnel armed to the teeth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment