NPP won 2016 polls on bloated register - Mac Manu

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) won the 2016 polls on bloated register, the party’s campaign manager, Peter Mac Manu has said.

The NPP in August last year claimed that following a painstaking investigations it had conducted it discovered that the 2015 Togolese voters’ register has 76,286 “potential matches” on that of Ghana’s.

This led to the purging of about 50,000 names from the 2016 voters’ register ahead of the conduct of last week’s polls that saw the election of the presidential candidate of the NPP, Nana Akufo-Addo as Ghana’s president-elect.

“…There’s been a lot of issues that post elections analysis would have to bring out. There’s been issues of bloated register and I still maintain that Ghana’s voters register is bloated,” said Mac Manu on Monday in an interview with Accra-based Joy FM.

The NPP over the years, he said had complained about the register that it cannot understand why out-going president, John Mahama garnered a whopping 400,000 more votes “over his parliamentary candidates” in the 2012 elections.

When asked by Kojo Yankson, host of Joy FM’s Super Morning Show that he [Mac Manu] thought the NPP won the 2016 polls on a bloated register, Mac Manu replied that “of course the register is bloated and I won’t deny that.”

“But we prevented the excesses from being played out on voting day,” he added.

That notwithstanding, he stated that the NPP won the elections as a result of the need for change that percolates every sphere of the country.

He said in “…2008 and 2012 elections were quite different and different from the 2016 election. If you look at the political environment; the electoral environment, the economic environment, the security environment - they’re different."

“…So you have to update yourself and measure up to the current environment to be able to take advantage because it is a competition… a competition of ideas and the key person in this whole saga of elections is the voter. So you have to measure up to the concerns and needs of the voter and you are going to meet it and that’s exactly what the New Patriotic Party did for the 2016 elections,” he added.