Hon. Member of Parliament, MP for Ashaiman Constituency, Ernest Norgbey has exposed the lies and inconsistencies in a press release from the Electoral Commission, EC outfit regarding deletion of his name and others.
According to him, the EC in that statement sought to discredit him and downplay the severity of the exclusion of legitimate registrants from the voters register.
He explained that in the morning of Friday, 18 September, he went to the Celestial SHS 1 voter exhibition center with Center code C260703 to verify his name. “My name was not found on the register which occasioned the verification officer to fill out my details on the EC’s own voter inclusion form”.
In a related development, he said he realised that at this same center, where about 843 voters were registered during the last voter registration exercise, the exhibition register only contained 257 registrants. “I was alarmed by this so I quickly deployed my research officers to conduct an audit of all the registers exhibited at all the exhibition centers across the constituency”.
“To my utmost shock, out of 167,286 people registered, we only found about 146,000 names in the registers exhibited. Over 21,000 names were missing from the registers”, he was alarmed.
“I immediately began mounting pressure on the EC to do the needful by restoring every one of the 21,000 voters who have been expunged from the register”, Hon. posited.
In a press release sent to National Tymes indicated that, on Saturday, after the people of Ashaiman had massed up at the offices of the EC and before he could address the press in his office, the EC released a new set of registers and claimed to have restored about 14,000 names onto the register including his (MP).
He added the EC immediately, released a statement together with a screenshot of his voter information in their newly updated register to create the impression that he (MP) lied about his exclusion and 21,000 others from the register. “This behaviour by the EC is unfortunate and smacks of gross dishonesty”, the MP opined.
Adding, he said, “even beyond the 14,000 names that the EC claims to have restored, there’s still a remainder of 7,000 legitimate registrants yet to be restored onto the electoral roll for which reason I throw a caution to the EC that my constituents and I shall not rest on our oars until the last of the remaining 7,000 affect registrants is put back onto the register”.
It is therefore astonishing that instead of explaining to the good people of Ashaiman and the nation at large how data on over 21,000 people could go missing on a voters register in one constituency alone, the Electoral Commission has chosen to rather resort to the media to peddle falsehood, the MP stated.
“If the Electoral Commission, EC has any shred of credibility left, it would apologize to the good people of Ashaiman and Ghanaians whose names were wrongfully removed and actually take steps to restore them back onto the register in order not to disenfranchise them”, Ernest Norgbey added.
