3 days ago
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The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has presented its case for a forensic audit of the voters register to civil society organisations, religious bodies and the diplomatic community ahead of the December 2024 polls.
The party contends that the register is fraught with irregularities which could affect about 300,000 votes and ultimately affect the credibility of the pending polls.
The irregularities, the NDC itemised include 243,540 previous transfers illegally added to 2024 transfers, over 15,000 unidentifiable voter transfers paths, 3,957 names deleted from the roll, 2,094 voters transferred to different polling stations and corrupt files.
Dr Edward Omane Boamah, the NDC’s Director of Elections and IT, told participants at the meeting in Accra on Monday that the NDC was uncovering more irregularities and an audit of the voter roll and the Electoral Commission’s IT system would put all minds at ease for a smooth poll on December 7.
He explained the process the NDC used to uncover the irregularities but said many more could be on the roll which contained over 17 million voters hence the call for the independent audit where all political parties would be present.
“What we did was to use SQL to query the database to check if a voter is present in the current register of not, if any voter has his or her polling station changed and whether they are legal. If they are legal, you expect that it should be in the absent list of that polling station and in the transfer list of the other polling station he or she would have been transferred to.
“You may have those ones showing but if you go beyond the quantitative and dig into the qualitative, for all you know, they may not have transferred. This is why we say our methodology cannot unearth everything that is afflicting the register hence the need for the audit,” Dr Boamah explained.
According to him, the audit would help identify the root cause of the irregularities and prevent recurrence of same as the perpetrators of the errors could still undertake their illegal acts.
The NDC, Dr Boamah said does not trust the EC to independently correct the errors as its conduct over the last few years does not engender trust, hence the need for a third party to be part of the process to close all the gaps identified in the IT system which made the unsolicited transfers possible.
“We need to do the forensic audit of the register because I want my vote to be protected. It will unravel the root cause(s) of avoidable and sometimes deliberate errors which we have seen,” he stated.
The General Secretary of the NDC, Fifi Fiavi Kwetey, on his part entreated Ghanaians to make their positions known on national issues rather than leaving the debate to the NDC and New Patriotic Party (NPP).
He said leaning the national discourse to the two dominant parties leaves the matters obfuscated and buried without the needed solution.
“Rather than ask me what we are going to do next, we should be hearing from you where you stand on what we have presented, what your verdict is regarding same.
“Often, I get sad (when national issues) are left between the NDC and NPP and everybody else looks on unconcerned. There are things that are blatantly obvious and you don’t need to know what NDC says or NPP says but what the real truth is.
“We need to push a situation where it is not about what NDC has said or what the NPP has said but what the truth is. If we simply leave it to what NDC says and what NPP says, the truth gets buried,” he stated.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
