A private legal practitioner and a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) legal team, Abraham Amaliba, has said that the creation of additional collation centres as proposed by the Election Commission is a recipe for rigging electoral results.
His comments are in support of the position of the former Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr. kwadwp Afari Gyan, who advised that the commission should be mindful of creating more collation centres as they may affect the electoral results.
Lawyer Amaliba, who spoke on TV3’s New Day, challenged the necessity for having a regional coalition centre, indicating that the existing procedure has not affected the validity of electoral results to date.
“So, the EC itself has not come to tell us what it seeks to cure. You put in policies and plans because there is a mischief you want to cure, what is the mischief here? When we were directly sending results from the constituency to the region, where did we get it wrong? It is affecting the validity, or did it affect the fairness of the process, did it? No,” he said.
Among other things, Abraham Amaliba advised that the Electoral Commission take cues from the former EC chair, Kwadwo Afari-Gyan who has so many years of experience in the electoral processes of Ghana.
“And you are going to listen to him because he is experienced, I think that the pollical parties must take this up at IPAC and ensure that the right things are done. So that we will reduce the incidence of rigging elections. And this is not coming from me, this is coming from somebody who has presided over that institution for so many years and I tend to agree with him that more coalition centres create the tendency for rigging,” he said.
Source: ghanaweb.com
