2020 polls: Legal tussle imminent – CDD

There is a possibility that the Electoral Commission (EC) will be sued by one of the political parties ahead of the December 7 presidential and parliamentary elections, Mawuse Domenu, Head of Research at the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), has said.

His comments follow the numerous concerns against the ongoing voter exhibition exercise raised by the main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The NDC had claimed that thousands of names of its members have been removed from the newly compiled voters register.

To that end, the flagbearer of the party Mr John Dramani Mahama has said he will not accept the results of the 2020 presidential elections if the processes leading to it are flawed.

He explained at a press conference at the headquarters of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Accra on Thursday, September 24 that the Electoral Commission, Ghana (EC) has carried itself in a way that does not engender confidence among some political parties, ahead of the elections.

Addressing journalists on the alleged missing of some names on the recently compiled voters register, the NDC flagbearer said the EC has sidestepped an important stakeholder in Ghana’s electoral process, the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) and this has resulted in untold challenges of the elections management body as well as the parties.

“There is something happening in this exhibition that we have never seen since 1992. We have been taking part in registration and exhibition of voter registers and some of the areas where a whole segment of names, thousands of names can get missing from the register is unacceptable".

“That is why we are saying that it is the widespread scale of the incident and the quantum that we are dealing with that are the problem.”

For him, the exhibition is usually characterized by low turnout and so the situation will get out of hand on elections day.

“So, if you go to those stations where 700 people’s names are missing, and 700 people’s names are missing, if they don’t come for exhibition, how are you going to capture them and replace them in the register?

Speaking on this development in an interview with Alfred Ocansey on the News 360 on TV3 Thursday September 24, Mr Domenu said “ Looking at the timetable of the EC, I think the timetable is very restricted so if they do not take time there might probably be a whole kind of legal tussles.

“We think that the exhibition exercise provides an opportunity for the register to be cleaned. In addition to that once the register is also prepared and it is ready, once it is certified the EC will provide copies to various political parties.

“That also provides another opportunity for the parties to actually examine the register and try and deal with some of the issues in there.”