Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) is calling for an independent audit of the new biometric voter register ahead of the December polls..

According to the party, the audit will check deduplication and multiple registration issues as announced by the the Electoral Commission (EC).

NDC Director of Election, Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen programme Thursday said they don’t trust the EC to do an independent job.

He claimed staff of the Commission, who until now did that job, have been transferred and the new people are not known to political parties.

“We believe the EC is not neutral and we have not hidden it that is why we are very vigilant,” he said.

“Technically, any credible Biometric Verification System is able to detect duplicate registration in real-time and address same. So it beats our imagination that this registration in the midst of a deadly pandemic, people will move from one registration centre to another to engage in multiple registration,” he wondered.

The NDC Director of Elections wants the EC to appoint an independent audit firm to investigate.

“We are reliably informed that the EC’s own system is defective and therefore deduplicates registrants by itself so they should look internally at their systems and processes. That is why we are calling for an independent audit of the entire register in relation to multiple registration,” he stressed.

Mr Afriyie-Ankrah also wants details of all the multiple registrations made available to the political parties for verification.

“We are highly suspicious of this move because we are aware the management of the EC has transferred almost all the experienced IT experts at the headquarters to the various regions for very strange reasons,” he said.