EC contradicting itself on proxy voters – PPP

The Electoral Commission of Ghana is giving conflicting figures about the number of people who will be voting by proxy in this year’s general elections, General Secretary of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Murtala Muhammed, has said.

This follows a revelation by EC Chair Charlotte Osei on Thursday that only 534 people will be voting by proxy in the elections, instead of the 270,000 being bandied about.

“I’m saying that this 534 is new because at IPAC, the operations director said it was 800. It’s in our minutes, so you see conflicting figures…” Mr Muhammed told Emefa Apawu on Class91.3FM’s 505 news programme.

Mrs Osei also denied allegations that the EC was planning to rig the polls for a particular party through the proxy votes.

Speaking to the media, Mrs Osei also refuted accusations that the EC also intended to use the special or early voting process to rig the polls.

“We’ve also been told that we are going to use the special voting process to rig the elections. In 2012, we had about 120,000 people who took part in the special voting; this year, the number is about half of that excluding the electoral staff and we’ve added the media this year. So the media and security personnel come to about 29,473, so how we are going to use this to rig the elections still defies our imagination,” she explained.

Mrs Osei’s response follows claims by the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) that it intends marching to the premises of the EC to demand the list of proxy voters ahead of the 7 December polls.

The party’s Director of Elections, Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, told Class News that the march had become necessary because the EC had refused to release the list despite several demands.

“We may have to march to the commission to demand this list from them and we will encourage every NPP member everywhere who is free to escort us or accompany us to the commission to go and demand the list,” he said.