Africa-Press – Ghana. According to the Electoral Commission (EC), it’s disingenuous for the Convenor of Election Watch Ghana, Mark Ewusi Arkoh, to describe the Commission’s five missing laptops as biometric voter registration (BVR) kits.
Mr Arkoh, at a press conference in Accra on Monday, May 20, alleged that some missing biometric voter registration (BVR) kits are being used to register some unqualified applicants.
He underscored that the group was convinced that “…the EC’s mistake on Day two was not accidental but rather figures coming from the stolen BVRs.”
“We can firmly conclude that the stolen BVRs are in the custody of unscrupulous individuals who are their counterparts, concocting and illegally registering unqualified people with the BVRs in question,” he noted.
But the election management body dismissed the allegations, emphasising that at no point did the Commission report missing BVRs.
Moreover, the EC while dismissing the allegation, challenged Mr. Arkoh to provide location evidence to substantiate his claims.
The Deputy Commissioner in Charge of Operation, Samuel Tetteh, addressing the media at the EC’s headquarters on Tuesday, May 21, urged the public to disregard the allegations, saying they are “unfounded and without merit aimed at deceiving the public.”
“The attention of the Commission has been drawn to a press conference by a group called Election Watch Ghana, during which one Mark Ewusi alleged that the Electoral Commission was using stolen biometric voter registration (BVR) kits to register people secretly.
“The Commission urges the public to disregard these baseless and unfounded allegations as they are without merit…the Commission has never reported that Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits have been stolen.”
“The Commission reported to the security agencies that five laptops were missing…describing the five missing laptops as BVRs is a deliberate attempt by certain groups to deceive the public.”
According to Mr Tetteh, the Commission’s decision not to disclose what it considers security sensitive information cannot be “misconstrued as providing a cover for the Commission to register voters from some undisclosed location.”
“We challenge the Election Watch Ghana to provide information on locations where they believe this illegal registration is going on. The Commission urges the political who are key stakeholders in the electoral process to publish their collated daily registration figures from all gazetted registration centres and inform the public if the figures published by the Commission do not reflect the number of voters registered at the gazetted registration centres,” he stated.
Meanwhile, the Commission said it has registered 522,025 applicants after 13 days of the ongoing exercise.
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