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The Ashaiman deputy has responded to a statement from the Election Commission that countered his claims that there was a deliberate omission of his name along with 21,000 others from the electoral roll.
Ernest Henry Norgbey said that the EC in its communication sought to discredit him and downplay the seriousness of the error that could deprive people of the right to vote.
In his press release, Ernest detailed the fact of the day he discovered the absence of his name. He asked the electoral body to explain how such a large number of voter records can be missing from a single district.
“On the morning of Friday, September 18, I went to the Celestial Voter Display Center SHS 1 with Center code C260703 to verify my name. My name was not found in the registry, prompting the verification officer to fill in my details on the EC’s own voter inclusion form.
“I have pictorial evidence of this and have accordingly attached the same to this release. Interestingly, I noticed that in this very center, where we registered about 873 voters during the last voter registration exercise, the exhibition register only contained 257 registrants.
“I was alarmed by this, so I quickly dispatched my investigative officers to conduct an audit of all the records displayed at all the exhibition centers throughout the district.”
“To my greatest surprise, out of 167,286 people registered, we only found about 146,000 names in the records displayed. More than 21,000 names were missing from the records.
“I immediately began to pressure the EC to do what was necessary to restore each of the 21,000 voters who have been removed from the registry,” he said.
Mr. Norgbey stated that the EC changed the records that had been previously posted before he had a chance to address the press on the matter the next day.
“On Saturday, after the Ashaiman people concentrated on the EC offices and before I could address the press in my office, the EC released a new set of records and claimed to have restored 14,000 names to the record, including mine. .
“Immediately, they (the EC) issued a statement along with a screenshot of my voter’s information in their newly updated registry, creating the impression that I lied about my exclusion and 21,000 other people from the registry. This behavior by the EC is unfortunate and smacks of great dishonesty. “
“Even beyond the 14,000 names that the EC claims to have restored, there are still a remainder of 7,000 legitimate registrants that have not yet been restored in the electoral roll, so I warn the EC that my constituents and I are not dependent We will row until the last of the remaining 7,000 registered affections is put back on record, ”Ernest said.
Meanwhile, in his statement on September 19, the Ashaiman deputy noted that there was no chaos recorded during the registration period, therefore the error was unjustified.
But CE stated: “That is why the law incorporates and provides for the exercise of exhibition and mechanisms such as the inclusion process, which allows people who registered but cannot trace their names in the provisional registry to submit their application for inclusion” , the statement said.
The Commission indicated that the exhibition exercise, which is scheduled to end on Friday, September 25, aims to resolve such discrepancies.
The deputy has questioned the credibility of the body after the incident.
In April, Mr. Norgbey sued the Election Commission to demand the disclosure of information on acquisitions.
He said the EC’s explanation that the fees payable for his application, under the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2019, have not been approved by Parliament is not sustainable.
