A former Commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Justice Emile Short, has urged the Electoral Commission to ensure that the electoral process, particularly the time-table, is not disrupted by the several disagreements arising from the decision to disqualify some presidential aspirants.
According to him, the EC must expedite action on the processes of reviewing all submitted forms, to ensure that the country holds the general elections on December 7th, as mandated by the constitution.
Speaking in an interview with Citi News on Tuesday [November 8], on the sidelines of the launch of an interactive voter education platform, ‘Voter Match’ in Accra, Justice Short said, “the EC should ensure that this whole process of scrutiny of the nomination forms and taking a decision as to who qualifies and who does not qualify, should be brought back so that candidates will know at an early stage whether they are qualified to stand in the elections or not,” he said.
He added that, doing so will help ensure that “they [nominees] don’t spend time and resources doing campaign only to be told later that they don’ qualify; so I think it will be prudent to look at the calendar and to make sure that this whole process is done at a reasonable time before the election date itself,” he said. He further called on the Commission to adopt a participatory approach in dealing with political parties to ensure fairness in the process.
‘EC urged to stop the delay tactics’
Meanwhile, a senior Research fellow at the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), Ghana, Dr Kojo Asante has told Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC) to cease employing measures that will unduly delay the electoral process. He said the Electoral Commission’s (EC) reaction to court challenges of its decision to disqualify some presidential aspirants has been ‘unprecedented’.
He said the EC could have avoided dragging the election issues further following a Supreme Court order on Monday [November 7] which was supposed to bring finality to the entire challenges rather than announcing the discoveries of new errors on the nomination forms of some presidential nominees.
The Supreme Court ordered the EC to allow the disqualified aspirants up to the close of day Tuesday, November 8 to correct the errors on their nomination forms and resubmit them.
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