Peter Mac Manu, the former Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), has asked the Electoral Commission to change the collation system that will be included in the 2020 general elections.
The Electoral Commission set up collation centers in all of the constituencies for the December 7 election, where officials from the Commission presented data from the different polling stations.
The Commission also set up the regional collation centres.
According to the former NPP chairman, the EC’s new collation system contributed to the election’s high level of abuse.
“You set up a collation center of 265 or so polling stations, including Techiman South. It ensures that 265 presiding officers will be present, causing the entire venue to become crowded and disorderly. People come to line up because they are hungry for results, which makes it difficult for people to do the arithmetic.”
“You require a calm environment to do arithmetic, but with all this noise and confusion, it becomes noisy, and then fake news and lies spreads that they are cheating, and the media begins to broadcast it over the airwaves. This leads to unpredictability.”
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His proposal comes only one day after the Electoral Commission declared the 2020 general elections to be the most competitive in the country’s Fourth Republic.
At a CODEO post-election workshop, the Commission’s Director of Training, Michael Boadu, attributed the achievement to their procurement process option.
“During the registration, we hired not less than 44,000 persons. In the exhibition, we hired over 71,000 exhibition officers and over 231,000 election officers for the election itself. In addition, between 2016 and 2020, we increased the number of polling stations by 10,000. This means that the Commission hired 146,122 more staff working on the exhibition and the election day alone and yet, we managed to reduce the cost per person by almost half,” he said
The National Democratic Congress, on the other hand, has a particular take on the Electoral Commission, which is headed by Jean Mensa.
The NDC said the EC was biased after boycotting an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting to study the December 7 general elections.
SOURCE: ATLFMONLINE
