NPP urges Electoral Commission to clarify the status of biometric machines used in Ghana presidential election

The General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has called on the Electoral Commission in Ghana to clarify the status of all biometric verification machines used in the country’s latest election, earlier this month.

General Secretary Kwado Owusu Afriyie has made these calls, as reports of District Returning Officers allege that they had received instructions to reset biometric machines to zero verification at the polling stations, Joy Online reports.

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) party’s John Dramani Mahama has won the election with 50.7% of the vote, narrowly defeating the NPP’s Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who held 47.74% of the vote.

“We hope that this is not true, because it would amount to tampering with evidence and in clear breach of the law governing public elections which provides that all material documents and materials must be preserved for at least one year after an election,” Afriyie said.

“The NPP is about to embark upon the most important legal case in Ghana’s history, which we are confident, will nullify the illegitimate declaration by the EC on December 9 and the inauguration of a President on the basis of a fraudulent vote count and declaration.”

“These biometric machines are likely to be used as evidence to show that the actual vote count in many areas, especially, NDC strongholds, far exceeds the number of biometric verifications. We have reason to suspect that the NDC and some EC officials collaborated together in a systematic, deliberate and coordinated manner to break the law and disenfranchise voters who followed the correct procedures,” Afriyie said.

This news comes shortly after the presidential election in the country has wrapped. As reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, Ghana now leads the world in biometric voter registration and verification.

This election has been anything but easy in Ghana, where a poor turnout to test the new biometric voting system and early reports of alleged biometric voter ID card complicated the implementation of this new voting system before the election even began.

Also reported in BiometricUpdate.com, members of the youth wing of the NPP lodged the accusation of biometric voter ID fraud in November.

Article Topics

biometric enrollment  |  biometrics  |  civil ID  |  elections  |  fraud  |  government  |  law enforcement  |  national ID  |  verification  |  voter registration