Voters' register: Your argument doesn't make sense - Franklin Cudjoe fires EC again

The essence of compiling a new voters' register for the 2020 presidential and parliamentary polls has been rubbished by IMANI Ghana boss, Franklin Cudjoe.

In his opinion, the arguments for the compilation of a new register as given by the Electoral Commission (EC) doesn't make sense and described the reasons given by the EC as "nauseating".

"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," he said.

Director of Elections at the EC earlier insisted that the current register should be replaced to make it more capable of tackling the verification challenges that occur on election day, given experiences from past elections.

But Franklin Cudjoe speaking on Accra-based Citi FM 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."

He argued that "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."