Allow EC to do its work - ASIG urges political parties

Advocate for Social Intervention Ghana (ASIG), a civil society organization, spearheading social justice in the country, has asked political parties to give the Electoral Commission peace to work.

According to ASIG, the EC as an independent constitutional body has the mandate to ensure that the country’s electoral processes were conducted in a free, fair, and transparent manner to the satisfaction of all interested parties.

It was therefore important for political parties to desist from trying to dictate to the Commission on what it should do.

In a statement signed by Mr Emmanuel Arthur, Executive Director and issued in Kumasi, ASIG urged political parties to stop attempts to prevent the EC from compiling a new voters’ register.

It said the argument that a new voters’ registration exercise would compromise the social gathering protocols of COVID-19, does not hold since the EC could find practicable ways to conduct the exercise.

The statement pointed out that even if EC was applying the social gathering protocol and decided to register 25 persons a day in each of the 33,000 polling stations across the country, the outcome would be an enormous success.

It said unless there was a very comparing reason, the EC should be allowed to start the process or registering voters for the 2020 general elections.

The statement appealed to the EC, to put in place measures that would ensure that every qualified person was registered in order not to disenfranchise anybody from exercising his or her constitutional rights of voting.

It reminded political parties that the country does not belong to them, but rather, it was an opportunity which Ghanaians were offering them to lead.

They therefore, need not try to create the impression that they should always win elections and exercise political power.

Political parties should also desist from attempts to create confusion when they are in opposition.