(Bloomberg) — Ghana’s biggest opposition party started a nationwide protest Tuesday, demanding a forensic audit of the voters’ register before the Dec. 7 polls.
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The demonstrations dubbed ‘Enough is Enough,’ the National Democratic Congress party alleges it detected thousands of unauthorized transfers and deletions of voter names without prior consent.
“We’ve never seen this in our democratic history where registered voters have their names either deleted or transferred to remote regions of the country without authorization by the individual voters,” NDC spokesman Sammy Gyamfi said in an interview before the march. “We are asking the Electoral Commission to allow all political parties and stakeholders to select IT experts to come together with the EC’s IT experts to audit the systems and the register so that we can have a credible roll.”
Illegal voter transfers have bloated the roll by more than 243,000 names with 3,957 being fraudulently deleted without notice, Gyamfi alleged.
Former President John Dramani Mahama and flagbearer of the NDC, who lost to President Nana Akufo-Addo in the 2016 and 2020 polls, will face off with Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia of the New Patriotic Party in this year’s elections. Akufo-Addo is stepping down after his second and final four-year term.
Gyamfi called on development partners, such as the US, UK and the United Nations Development Program to intervene and ensure the EC attends to these concerns in order not to jeopardize the peace and stability that the West African nation has enjoyed since 1992.
“The commission has addressed all the concerns raised by the NDC in the voters register,” Bossman Asare, a deputy chairman of the EC responsible for corporate affairs, said by phone Tuesday.
At a press conference last week, the commission said the NDC’s call for a forensic audit was “misguided.”
“The commission strongly believes that the surest way to attaining a robust and credible register is not through demonstrations,” Samuel Tettey, deputy chairman in charge of operations at the commission said Sept. 12.
Millions of party supporters participated in the march across the country, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, a member of parliament said in a live broadcast on Accra-based TV3. “We will continue to protest until our demands are met,” he said.
The march in the capital, Accra, ended with the presentation of a petition to Parliament and the EC.
(Updates with presentation of petition in last paragraph.)
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