IPAC has no locus in activities of the EC - Anyidoho

Deputy General Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Koku Anyidoho has warned the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to stay away from the operations of the Electoral Commission (EC).

According to him, there is no law in the Constitution of Ghana which makes any party and IPAC relevant in the administrative operations of the Electoral Commission (EC) in terms of which company should be contracted to transmit results from the polling stations electronically.

John Boadu on Okay FM’s 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show mentioned that there is a twist to the agreement on how the election results should be transmitted electronically.

"This is what all the political parties at IPAC meeting accepted and agreed on that we should buy scanners for the 275 EC officials at the constituency levels and then scan the results electronically to the national collation centre. This is written in plain language and we all agreed to it,” John Boadu pointed out.

"EC is now looking for a company which can transmit the results electronically from all the 29,000 polling stations to the collation centres and then to national collation centre . . .there has never been any meeting on this new development from EC, whether through Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendation or at IPAC meeting to agree that the results will be scanned from each and every polling station and transmited electronically to the national collation centre,” John Boadu emphasised.

But Koku Anyidoho on the same platform pooh-poohed that “NPP cannot usurp the powers of the Electoral Commission (EC), because the EC has the mandate to contract any company to carry the job of the electronic transmission of the election results”.

“If there is lawlessness in NPP, they cannot extend the same to the EC operations. EC has the constitutional mandate to do its own work without consultation with NPP and IPAC . . . IPAC has no locus in the activities of the EC and so the IPAC cannot demand any explanation from EC concerning how the E-Transmission of the election results should be done,” he chided.