Special Voting: NDC accuses Ashanti EC boss of preventing agents from putting seals on ballot boxes

According to the Deputy Director of Elections and IT for the NDC, Dr. Rashid Tanko Computer, the Ashanti Regional Director of the EC, ahead of Monday’s Special Voting exercise, issued a directive preventing agents of the NDC from putting their seals on ballot boxes containing electoral materials.

Speaking in an interview on JoyNews, Dr. Tanko explained that political parties, in ensuring the integrity of elections, are allowed to place their seals on ballot boxes containing electoral materials before distribution to polling centres.

He alleged that the situation, however, was different in the Ashanti Region, where the EC director had issued a directive to stop the NDC from placing their seals on the ballot boxes.

“I am saying he gave instructions. He told them that the NDC should not put a seal. When I confronted him, he asked me, ‘If we have 400 ballot boxes, are you going to put seals on all of them?’ And I told him, ‘If you bring 1 million ballot boxes, I will put 1 million seals. That’s what the CI says,’” he said.

According to Dr. Tanko, it had to take his escalation of the matter to the Deputy Commissioners of the EC before the regional director backed down.

“They had to call him, and he finally backed down. But by then, some districts were already operating under his initial orders,” he bemoaned.

He further accused the Regional Director of allegedly instructing electoral officials not to share the serial numbers of validation stamps with party agents. This, he also noted, contravened CI 127, the regulation guiding elections in Ghana.

“The CI is very clear,” Dr. Tanko-Computer said. “Before voting begins, Part A and Part B of the pink sheet must be completed. Part B includes the validation stamp number, which must be recorded to ensure that any stamp not matching that number during sorting can be identified as foreign material. Yet, the Regional Director ordered that this information should not be shared with our agents,” he alleged.

In response to the allegation, the Director of Elections for the NPP, Evans Nimako, described the claims by the NDC as exaggerated.

“Sealing of ballot boxes is done at multiple levels—starting from Accra at the printing houses to the regional and district levels. If Tanko-Computer’s agents missed sealing at one point, they should simply rectify it at another,” he said.

Ahead of Ghana’s general election scheduled for December 7, 2024, the Electoral Commission of Ghana conducted a Special Voting exercise to allow election officials, security personnel, and media practitioners to cast their ballots early.

A total of 131,478 voters, representing 0.007 percent of the total registered voter population of 18,741,159, were expected to participate in the Special Voting exercise. The exercise began at 0700 hours and ended at 1700 hours. The exercise was initially scheduled to take place across 328 centers nationwide but was rescheduled for eligible voters in the Western and Eastern regions following the recall of ballots for the two regions.