Electoral Commission Chairman Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan has
announced that 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.
Dr. Afari-Gyan was speaking Wednesday at a news conference in
Accra where he highlighted the EC’s preparedness for Friday’s
polls.
With just a couple of days 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 reported that all materials relevant to the elections have
already been distributed in 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 that verification machines processed
large numbers of voters during the early voting exercises, “so in
our largest polling stations, which has 1,100, even there people
can be processed for voting.”
Touching on the security officials who were unable to vote
early because their names were missing from the register, Dr.
Afari-Gyan said the problem was not with the commission but with
the security agencies that failed to submit the particulars of
their ID cards or provided wrong information as the list of early
voters was being compiled.
“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 explained.
The EC chairman said that his organization has held a meeting
with the security agencies and they have agreed that those who were
unable to vote should go to their polling stations on Friday to
vote.
He said that such persons, together with media personnel who
have accreditation, will be allowed to the front of the queues at
their polling stations so that they can vote quickly and get back
to their official Election Day duties.
