NPP demands national voters register audit
The Ashanti regional branch of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is calling for an immediate auditing of the national voters’ register because of what it says are ‘massive fraud and irregularities’ it has detected.
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The party says this must be done to set the parameters right for the 2016 general elections.
At a hurriedly organised press conference in Kumasi Sunday, the regional Chairman, Bernard Antwi-Bosiako, showed documents he said showed for instance, a discrepancy in the Form 1A, which is a manually collected primary data form on voters, as well as Form 1C which is the biometric.
The chairman said the normal practice required that the figures on the Form 1A and the Form 1C should tally, saying that if nothing was done about it, it could lead to a national disaster.
Showing a number of voter ID cards from the Western Region and other parts of the country, some of which had 1980 as the eligibility date, Chairman Wontumi, as the regional chairman is fondly called, said the alleged fraud, some of which were allegedly uncovered after the recently-held national limited registration exercise, was so alarming that it could trigger upheavals during the election.
The party is thus urging the Electoral Commission to make available the 1A forms to all political parties for study and to ensure that suggestions are made to deal with the alleged discrepancies.
Listing a litany of allegations, Chairman Wontumi told journalists that over 50,000 voters in the region alone were disenfranchised during the limited registration exercise while some voters instead of having one identifiable number, had two.
Reason for press conference:
The party said after writing to the EC a number of times on the need to ensure the sanctity of the register without response; it had no option than to resort to the media for action to be taken.
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Chairman Wontumi said the party has lined up a number of action plans to safeguard the sanctity of the register but that would only become necessary if the EC fails to act.
International Community:
The regional chairman called on the international community and some notable world leaders including UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, and US President, Barrack Obama, to act with dispatch to avoid a recurrence of what happened in some West African countries, especially Cote d’Ivoire, from happening in Ghana.
He said, the international community must not wait till there was a disaster before they stepped in to restore peace.