The Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan
has said 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.
