?Machomen? don?t win elections ? EC boss

The Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), Dr. Kwadwo Afari Djan, has urged political parties that resorted to the services of thugs (known locally as machomen) during campaigning and during elections, to desist from the practice, as it did not have any positive impact on the hiring parties.

He noted that if anything at all, their presence rather scared and irritated prospective sympathizers of those parties and the electorate in general, from freely identifying with them. Dr. Djan made these observations in Ho, the Volta regional capital recently when the commission organized a one-day programme to brief regional executives of political parties and the media on the replacement of the voters? register.

?How can you hire thugs to terrorize the electorate during registration and campaigning periods, and expect them to vote for you on Election Day? The decision to vote for a particular party or candidate comes from the mind, and I think it is better to convince them with good messages and manifestoes than to put fear in them?, he urged.

He argued that because this country operated a secret ballot system (as against the open ballot system in, say, Nigeria) people could, out of fear, promise the thugs their votes, but go ahead and do their hearts? desire when they entered the booth to thumbprint.

Using one of the by-elections he had supervised last year as living testimony, the EC boss said at a particular polling station at Asankragwa, in the Amenfi West constituency, a particular political party, which hired the services of a bus full of thugs to intimidate people, in the name of monitoring the elections, polled only 15 votes at the end of the day.

Dr. Djan failed to name the political party, but cautioned that it would be better for political activists to allow people to turn out and register in their numbers so that they could cast their votes, than to prevent perceived opponents from registering.

?Mind you, your perceived political opponents might change their minds and swing to your party before the voting day, so if you prevent them from registering now and you win their hearts later, all your efforts would then have been a wasted one because you must have disenfranchised them long ago?, he lectured.

He hinted that even though registration and voting was the constitutional right of every citizen above 18 years and of sound mind, it was not compulsory to exercise that right.

At the same time, he pleaded with all who would turn up to register, to give preferential treatment to the aged, physically challenged, nursing mothers and pregnant women so they wouldn?t stay unnecessarily long in the queues.

On the quality of forms to be used, Dr. Djan said he was sure that the security features on them would not make it possible for any printing establishment in the whole of the West African sub-region to print without being caught.

He also assured that the computer procured by the EC this time was so fast, it processed over 7,000 forms every hour, and this would adequately take care of 10.5 million names, assuming the same figure was arrived at in the registration, before the elections.

?There may be 20,000 people bearing the same name and spelling in the register, and may resemble one another, but remember the computer identifies numbers and not names?, he said, and added that there was no way two people would bear the same identification number.

He, however, pleaded with communities near the border towns to be vigilant so that aliens, who might have no Ghanaian blood whatsoever, did not register, and explained that the commission would do all it could to make the final register a credible one, even though there was no perfect one anywhere in the world.