EC hurried to exhibit a non-existent register – NDC IT head

The Head of IT of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Osei Kwame Griffiths, has accused the Electoral Commission, Ghana (EC) of announcing a voter exhibition exercise when there was no proper register.

He said the Commission should have taken its time to rectify all the anomalies before announcing an exhibition of the so-called provisional register.

He was speaking on The Key Points on TV3/3FM on Saturday, September 26.

Osei Kwame Griffiths was speaking in relation to complaints by his party that names of its supporters have been missing from the register. So far, the flagbearer of the NDC has cited Binduri, Tamale South, Ketu South, Keta and KEEA as some of the constituencies where names of its supporters have either gone missing from the register or their voter IDs duplicated.

“In the Central Region, glaring cases of duplication of card numbers were also recorded in 14 centers in the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem Constituency,” John Mahama told journalists in Accra on Thursday, September 24.

“And one of such cases involved my running mate, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang.”

Mr Osei Kwame Griffiths said the EC only “hurried to [do] an exhibition when they didn’t have a register”.

As regards the anomalies, he said: “Some of these things normally happen during exhibitions because that is the essence of exhibition but then the volume with which they are occurring is frightening.”

But speaking via Zoom on the same programme, the Director of Electoral Services at the EC, Dr Serebour Quaicoe, said the incidents are normal as same were recorded in 2012 when the new biometric system was introduced.

He said every district in the country then had a problem one way or the other with the register and expressed suspicions that those challenges may even be existent until the compilation of the new register.

But he assured that all the anomalies will be solved before October 1, when another round of registration for eligible Ghanaians will be done.

For him, that is the essence of the voter exhibition exercise, which ends on Sunday, September 27 after being extended by two more days.