Commentator, Sydney Casley-Hayford, has alleged that the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), manipulated the voters’ register for years.
Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue, Mr. Casley-Hayford said: “My theory is that, over the years, the NDC had started, even as far back as Jerry Rawling’s time, manipulating the voters’ register.”
The member of pressure group, Occupy Ghana, revealed that he gathered this information from his “private correspondence” adding that he could “prove it statistically.”
According to him, the “extra numbers that were on the voters’ register and that have been on the voters’ register for decades, were all padded numbers.”
“This is where I believe sincerely that the NDC deceived themselves into thinking that they had those million plus votes,” he added.
Sydney Casley-Hayford said the fact that the NDC won the 2008 elections while the party was out of power, did not necessarily mean they could not have manipulated the register.
“The fact that you are not in power does not mean you can’t have somebody who is in a position to change numbers that the people in power don’t know about. If I have a deep throat somewhere in the Electoral Commission who is influential enough and can manipulate numbers well enough, he can do that without the party necessarily being in power.”
He was also livid over what he called the NDC’s constant deception of the citizenry, even after losing the 2016 general elections.
“I think that the NDC after so many decades of running this country has started believing their own lies. For a long time they kept trumpeting their success stories and we would refuse to listen to whole facts. Even at the time when the economy was slipping and many people were venting, they still wanted you to believe that everything was fine. When they went to the IMF and we commented, they still wouldn’t listen,” he said.
Ahead of the elections, Abu Ramadan and one Evans Nimako went to the Supreme Court to seek an interpretation of the court’s earlier ruling on the validity of the voters’ register.
The Supreme Court subsequently ordered the Electoral Commission to with immediate effect remove the names of about 56,000 people who registered with NHIA cards as proof of Ghanaian citizenship, ahead of the 2012 elections.
