The People’s National Convention (PNC) has emphasized the potential strain that the voter register exhibition exercise will have on its people.
The PNC’s General Secretary, Janet Nabla, in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM, lamented that the exercise would impose a financial burden on the party.
This is due to the fact that the register will be exhibited in every polling centre, necessitating the presence of a party representative at each of these centres.
She disclosed that the party is still struggling to compensate members who represented it during the recently concluded limited voter registration exercise and thus having to deploy agents to all polling stations across the country will exacerbate the party’s existing problems.
“Even with the registration at the district offices, majority of our people who went even wanted us to pay them at the end of the day and payment was becoming a big problem for our people. And now the polling centres have come, and it is even going to compound our problems because it is five days, and you won’t ask somebody to leave their work and go and stay there [at the centres] for nothing. The person is bound to ask you for money, and you will have to pay and that is another headache.”
Madam Nabla also expressed concern about the EC’s failure to convene an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting before announcing the exhibition.
“The exhibition exercise is fine, but I don’t know if it’s because this one is not political, that’s why the Electoral Commission has not called an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting to educate us on some of these matters so that we can, in turn, educate our members. I am thinking that this may be because it is non-partisan.”
The Electoral Commission announced on Wednesday during a press conference that it would exhibit the provisional voters’ register from Friday, November 3, 2023, to Tuesday, November 7, 2023, in preparation for the District Level Elections (DLE).
Meanwhile, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) says that despite raising concerns with the Electoral Commission’s decision to conduct the recent limited voter registration exercise at the district level, it has no objections to the planned exhibition of the voters’ register.
The Deputy Secretary of the NDC, Mustapha Gbande, said, “It is not about being happy. Why centralize registration for people to go through stress? The EC made the registration cumbersome.”
Despite these concerns, he emphasized that the NDC would not engage in further disputes with the EC regarding the voter register exhibition exercise and was determined to focus on mastering the electoral landscape to secure victory in the upcoming elections.
“That is the NDC’s position as far as this exercise is concerned. We have no objections to the exhibition they want to do. We will follow through, get people verified, and then we can move on to the district assembly elections.”
Mustapha Gbande, however, said that the NDC would not hesitate to raise red flags during the process if need be.
