The Electoral Commission (EC) has beaten a hasty retreat from its curious timeline of declaring the election results by Tuesday, December 8, 2020, saying “a new timeline will be communicated shortly”.
“To ensure that the declared Presidential results are 100% accurate and reflective of the will of the people, the Commission entreats the Public and all Stakeholders to exercise patience as the collation process continues in the presence of Political Party agents and election observers,” the EC said in a statement released this afternoon.
But the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) suspects that the EC is up to some tricks to swing the elections which it believed it had won, to the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Johnson Asiedu Nketia, the General Secretary of the NDC in a press conference this afternoon said he the party had picked up intelligence that the EC is being directed by “orders from above”, essentially hinting at the governing party attempting to teleprompt the EC to do its bidding.
The NDC questioned the curious refusal of the EC to receive results from the various Regional and Constituency collation centres as it had always been done. The EC appears to be waiting to announce the presidential election result at one go.
The NDC General Secretary has questioned this plan, as it incapacitates the agents of each party in the EC’s “Strong Room” from being able to cross-check the figures purportedly coming from the collation centres and verify their authenticity and correlation with certified data that had already been compiled by each party at the polling stations and collation centres.
The NDC scribe queried asking: “…What is happening?” adding that “any false step by the EC will come with serious consequences.
The NDC insists it has won 142 seats from the 275 total seats in the Ghanaians parliament and as such has absolute confidence that its presidential candidate, John Dramani Mahama has also won the presidency per the certified data it has in its possession.
The EC had raised suspicions a few weeks ago when it stated categorically that it was going to declare the presidential results of the elections within 24 hours after the ballots have been cast.
The election regulator has even gone ahead to print invitation letters to the declaration event.
Critics questioned the move because elections are often unpredictable and thus, setting a definitive time betrays the possibility of the election regulator having a sort of foreknowledge of how the activities around the elections would turn out.
The implausibility of the EC having foreknowledge of the potential turn of events in the election has forced some to suspect that the EC may be working on a scheme that will allow manipulation of the election results to fit a pre-planned agenda.