With less than three days to the National Democratic Congress’ presidential and parliamentary primaries, Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, says the Commission is yet to be furnished with the party’s voters’ register.
According to him, “The agreement was that we should have the registers and the ballot papers at least a week to the elections,” however, the NDC’s executives have failed to do so.
Currently, the scheduled date for the presidential and parliamentary primaries is at risk of being rescheduled following an injunction filed by an NDC presidential aspirant, Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, who insists that the voters’ register submitted to his team contains discrepancies.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe noted that till the NDC’s injunction is lifted by the court, the EC will withdraw from offering its services to the party.
He said it was to avoid such situations that the EC had urged the party to submit its voters’ register early for all challenges to be addressed timeously.
“So these things should have been made available a long time ago, because we knew that when such things are done you have people petitioning and the rest so we were thinking that if we had gotten it early enough, they would have addressed any challenges that may come out of it.
“There have been instances where we’ll go for the election and at the venue of the election the register will be brought to you and you may have to be making calls so that whilst you’re doing the election new names will be added and subtracted.
“So these things should be a lesson to the political parties that when they’re going to do anything they should [inaudible] ahead of time so that we will not be having challenges in registers…” he said.
The injunction case will be heard on Friday, a day to the scheduled May 13 election day.
Meanwhile, the NDC in a press statement has urged its party faithful and aspirants to keep calm as the party’s legal team handles the situation.
