The Ashanti Regional Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Abass Nurudeen, has revealed that the NDC collated its results ahead of the governing NPP and the Electoral Commission (EC) during the Kumawu by-election held last week.
According to him, polls closed at 5:00 PM on that day, and by 6:45pm, the NDC had successfully completed collating the results of the election and therefore already knew what each candidate had obtained while its pink sheets were all in safe custody.
The EC had announced it would begin its collation at 8:00PM.
Abass Nurudeen made this revelation in a video that has gone viral on social media to debunk the claims by a presenter of Kumasi-based Sompa FM, Omahene Yaw Adu Boakye that by 8:37 pm of that day, the NPP had collated the results of the by-election while the NDC had not.
The presenter went on to claim elections are now about technology.
However, Abass Nurudeen said the claims by the Sompa FM presenter is false and at the behest of the NPP to enable the NPP rig elections by presenting false figures to the general public as the true figures collated.
Giving examples, he said at the Bankoh Presby School during the Kumawu by-election, the NDC got 30 votes yet Multi-media reported the party had 3. At Sekyere, they reported the NPP had 850 votes even though no polling station has a voter population of more than 750.
He said interestingly, at the EC’s collation centre at 8:00PM that evening, NPP polling agents turned up with the false figures the media houses had announced.
However, they were check- mated; the evidence on the pink sheets showed that the results collated by the NDC were the right one and tallied with that of the EC. He said it is these collated figures of the NDC which tallies with that of the NDC that the NPP now went on to showcase on the screens at their collation centre at 8:37 p.m and which Yaw Adu Boakye was now claiming are results collated by the NPP ahead of the NDC.
Abass Nurudeen scoffed at the ignorance of Omahene Yaw Adu Boakye for stating that contemporary election in Ghana is about technology, asking how technology can prevent an EC official from giving one voter five ballot papers to go and vote.
He gave an example of what happened during the Kumawu by-election at a place called Bodomase when an old lady who needed assistance to vote and said she wanted to vote for the NDC was led by the EC official to rather vote for the NPP.
“How will technology prevent something like this? If Omahene understands Ghana’s electoral process, he’ll know that technology should be the least of anybody’s worries. The most important thing is to have well trained loyal agents in place”
He said that in Ghana, it is the EC that is the only constitutionally mandated body to collate electoral results but because the EC cannot be trusted, parties have resorted to collating results.
He said in advanced countries, political parties do not collate results; they all rely on results collated by their EC because their EC can be trusted.
In Ghana, however, that is not the case especially today because the Jean Mensa-led EC is not credible. Parties, he said, have thus resorted to collating results on their own so as not to be short-changed.
He called on NDC supporters to ignore the claims of the likes of Omahene Yaw Adu Boakye, accusing him and others of trying to create a perception that the NDC is unable to collate its results successfully so that during the 2024 election, fake figures by the NPP and their hirelings will be those the EC would announce and be accepted by the public while accusing fingers will be pointed at the NDC as failing to collate their results.
Source: Daily Post
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