The Acting Director of Elections for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Bede Ziedeng has debunked claims that the former Elections Director of the party, Ofosu Ampofo failed to collate results of the 2016 presidential elections.
Speaking at a press conference held at the NDC’s headquarters, Mr Bede Ziedeng explained that the fabrications are resultant actions of detractors of the party who have devoted their time to peddling falsehood.
“It is therefore factually inaccurate for anyone to make claims that the Election Directorate or the Director of Elections then, Hon. Ofosu Ampofo did not or failed to collate the results of the 2016 presidential elections, when indeed the facts point to the contrary.”
Mr. Ziedeng mentioned the lack of funding for the Directorates of elections of the party as one major reason for the slow gathering of results for the 2016 elections.
“We prepared a budget for the Directorate but we did not receive the necessary funding. We therefore were left with no alternative but to work with the tools we had at our disposal.”
The NDC has revealed that there was an attempt to establish structures to help in collating the results from the polling stations, unfortunately the system crashed hence they resorted to making use of the manual system.
“The infrastructure for the collation of results directly from the polling station in national elections does not exist in the NDC, and so could not have been deployed in the collation of results of the 2016 elections. What happened, however was that during the 2016 elections, there was an attempt to establish a new infrastructure for the collation of the results from the polling stations. But this was completely outside the Directorate and elections Directorate was not in its management.”
“Unfortunately, it was this infrastructure which crashed soon after it was deployed and therefore failed to provide any results for the party”, he stated.
According to the NDC Directorate the party was waiting for the Electoral Commission to gazette the polling station results so as to make a comparison of the figures but the EC has failed to make public the results of the presidential elections and so there is no opportunity for verification.
He noted that the EC must openly declare how its system got hacked prior to or latest by the 2020 polls or any system put in place will be challenged.
Mr Zeideng has also cautioned anyone saying that the NDC election department is filled with small boys. On the contrary he says, these Directorates are filled with committed and hardworking people.
“Let us make it clear unfortunately people have this view that the election department probably is made of small boys, it is not made up of small boy. It is made up of experienced and hardworking people, committed people and they know what it means to conduct an election and what it means to win an election.”
Source:ghanaweb.com
