I will not vote on Friday – Afari Gyan

The Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan has announced to journalists he will personally not vote in the elections to maintain his neutrality in the contest, he also stated that some 3000 electorates in the Kasena Nankana East District of the Upper East Region whose registration ended on Wednesday will not be allowed to vote.

“Unfortunately even though they have begun the process of registration, they cannot vote. Please to that we tried to register them at the same time as we registered you [Editors present] and they disrupted the registration process and chased our officers away only later to reconsider and then say that now you want to register. But by that time it’s already too late; our law says that if your name does not go into the register sixty days to an election then you cannot vote in that election”, he said.

Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan also revealed the Commission will declare the results of Friday’s election within 72 hours after the close of poll.

“We normally give ourselves 72 hours to deal completely with what has to be done but in 48 hours, we should know who is winning”, he said.

That was Dr Afari-Gyan speaking at a news conference in Accra to highlight the preparedness of the EC for Friday’s polls. With just a few hours to go he said

“we will not be limited by any timeline to announce the Presidential results, but will work within reasonable time to announce the results”.

He announced that all materials needed for the elections were already on the field,

“so we are ready to conduct the elections”.

“From the exercise we did on Tuesday on the Early Voting, we can say we have robust machines for the job”.

The EC chairman said very huge numbers of voters were processed for voting with the verification machines during the Early Voting, “so in our largest polling stations which has 1,100, even there people can be processed for voting”.

Touching on the hiccups of the Early Voting where some security officials were not able to vote because their names were missing from the register, Dr Afari-Gyan said the problem was not with the commission but with the security agencies which failed to submit the particulars of their ID cards and polling stations during the compilation of the list of personnel for the Early Voting and in some cases provided wrong information.

“In the voters register, we do not distinguish between professionals so if we are doing an exercise like this, we rely on information from the various security agencies who compiled the list for us”.

Based on the information provided for us we compiled a list of 29,914 members of the security services. We asked for ID cards and polling station numbers and if they did not provide us with them, we cannot allow them to vote. There were some cases in which the ID numbers were not correct”, Dr Afari-Gyan said.

The EC chairman said they have held a meeting with the security agencies and it has been agreed that those who were unable to vote should go to their polling stations on Friday to vote.

He said such persons together with media personal who have their accreditation, would be allowed to go ahead of the queue when they go to their polling stations so they can vote early and go back to continue with their official duties on Election Day.