EC deliberately deleting names of NPP supporters - Sam Pyne

The Ashanti Regional Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Samuel Pyne, has accused the Electoral Commission (EC) of deleting names of their supporters who did not register with National Health Insurance (NHIS) cards from the system including some constituency executives of the party.

He wondered why the EC is using the exhibition exercise as a strategy to clean the bloated voters’ register.

The EC on Monday July 18, 2016 begun exhibition and re-registration of voters who used the NHIS cards as a form of national identity to register ahead of the 2012 general elections.

56,772 names were deleted from the voters’ register upon a Supreme court order.

The EC recorded low turnout in almost all the polling centers which have been attributed to lack of publicity by the EC and other agencies.

In an interview with Ultimate Fm’s Isaac Bediako, Mr. Pyne said past record of exhibition exercise attendance by voters has always been low.

He accused the National Democratic Congress (NDC) of conniving with the EC officials to manipulate the system in favour of the former.

‘They should look at the pressure at the EC offices especially in Ashanti region, lots of people there, and people are getting frustrated, people feel the NDC is manipulating the system at the EC’s office in Ashanti region. Those who go there are frustrated telling us that when NDC officials come there, the system changes in favour of NDC, if that is a fact, they should do something about it to redeem their image,’ he alleged.

He lashed out at the EC and its stakeholders for the less publicity which culminated into low turn out.

‘Am not impressed at all the attendance is very low, and one I can attribute it to lack of awareness by the electoral commission and those who are supposed to make the information available to the public, making publications in the newspapers was simply not enough, how many people have been reading the papers, am also not happy with the process that they are going through.

Historically, the data of the EC suggests that whenever they there is any exhibition till 1992 till date, the percentage of people who patronize is just too abysmal, less than 40% always so why would you want to use this as a process in cleaning the register, because you have the history that people have not been patronizing such exercises then again there have been instances where people’s names have been deleted because they said they used NHIS cards in registering when it’s not so.

I can give you examples about three is my constituency officers have suffered this fate, when they know they used the old voters’ cards to register, these are some of the things they should look at,’ he said.

The Exhibition of voters’ register will end in August 7, 2016.