2020 general elections must be audited after it has been conducted - Patriot newspaper editor

Editor of the Patriot Newspaper, Peter Bamfoe has opined that a special audit of the 2020 elections and particularly the Electoral Commission (EC) must take place after the election has been conducted.

Speaking in an interview with Samuel Eshun on the Special Editors’ Take edition of the Happy Morning Show, he expressed that this audit was very necessary considering the fact that the electoral commission had spent so much into acquiring machines only to go back to manual verification.

“When we are done with this election we need to have a special audit of the 2020 elections. This country has spent a lot of money to buy machines even as at 2017. We bought new machines because the electoral commission told us that from 2011 there has not been any new machines.

It came out that they were actually lying to the people of Ghana. These machines that were bought under the previous administration, according to EC, were not going to be used by the new administration and that as a new electoral commissioner, you were going for a new set of machines.

You abrogated the contract with Superlock Technology Ltd (STL). Are you aware that as at 2018-2019 there were receipts from STL for some service that they have provided to the EC that they were still being paid? You are aware of this. So if you have gone to procure machines that you claim are superior to what existed before and that there are certain components such as facial recognition, and now today we are going back to manual verification, then we should be disappointed”, he told Samuel Eshun.

The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs Jean Mensa, says the Commission will allow manual verification of voters at the December polls.

She said the decision was to ensure that no voter was disenfranchised as provided for in Constitutional Instrument 127.

The Commission, however, plans to reduce the incidence of manual verification by making provision of the Commission’s new biometric verification kits which has both fingerprint and facial verification elements.