President of policy think tank IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has actually referred to as “nauseating” the Electoral Commission’s (EC) thinking for compiling a new voters’ register for the 2020 polls.
The EC which has actually been under extreme pressure from Franklin Cudjoe and other groups for a number of months now still insists it will go on with the brand-new electoral roll at the end of this month, June.
The Commission declares that the existing one is not credible enough for the polls.
Director of Elections at the EC, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe had earlier firmly insisted that the current register needs to be replaced to make it more capable of taking on the verification challenges that take place on election day, provided experiences from past elections.
However, speaking on Accra-based Citi FM, Franklin Cudjoe stressed that “It’s just becoming nauseating hearing some of the arguments being made in affirmation of a change in the voter roll. Absolutely none of them makes sense. In fact, they do not hold water. There’s no evidence that has been brought to bare.”
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He further explained that “The EC told the whole world that the biometric systems we have have reached their seven-year life cycle and so they needed to replace them. Then we went and verified from the EC’s own financial documents and there’s actually been purchasing and procuring items to improve the system. As recently as 2019, they purchased about 500 of these machines which enabled them to run the district level elections and the referendum that was done in 2018.”
“In fact, the EC has spent US$60 million in improving these systems in bringing them to near perfection so it cannot be true that all of a sudden without having done an audit of the asset of the EC, every bit of the system is kaput. They’ve never been able to show us a single piece of evidence to merit that claim.”
