The National Organizer of the opposition of the National Democratic Congress, Joshua Akamba has alleged that the Electoral Commission neglected their stance prior to declaring the election results in the Techiman South constituency.
According to him, although the NDC party agents were present at the collation centre, the EC official went ahead to declare the results without reconciling the figures with those independently recorded by the opposition party.
Speaking on Eyewitness News, Mr. Akamba stated that the representative for the NDC was present at the polling station contrary to the EC’s claims.
“We had our pink sheets with us but the Electoral Commission never called to sit with us to reconcile our figures, in regard to what they had, what we had, and what the NPP had to see if all the three figures tallied. But the EC officer went ahead to fill in what he wanted to fill and decided to declare the results.”
“When we asked him, he said that they could not find our agent and that was why he did that but at a point when he noticed his words were contradictory to that of the regional electoral officer, he said, ‘I refuse to talk and I zip my mouth’,” he added.
Meanwhile, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has rubbished claims by the opposition National Democratic Congress that the Techiman South parliamentary election was rigged.
According to them, the NDC’s claims that security personnel were used to skew the results in favour of the NPP is untrue.
Addressing the press at the Greater Accra Regional campaign office of the NPP, a former MCE for Techiman, Prince Yaw Donyina, said the NDC is peddling falsehood.
“They [security officers] were not there to intimidate anybody. It was because of the actions of the NDC, their chairman, their communicators that got a lot of people there [collation centre] and so there was the need for the police to protect the electoral officers… How could the declaration be made if collation was not done? That is an unacceptable electoral practice and could not have happened,” he said.
The election results from Techiman South is one of the constituencies being disputed by both the governing New Patriotic Party and the opposition.
Both parties claim their parliamentary candidate won the seat but the EC declared the NPP candidate as the winner.