Special voting at Cantonments Police Station unfair - Candidates

Three parliamentary candidates of the Dade Kotopon constituency on Tuesday said allowing security personnel from outside Accra to vote in the constituency as special voters was unfair and inappropriate.

The reason given was that the personnel were not members of their constituencies and therefore did not know the various candidates contesting to be members of parliament.

Mr. Eric Ossa Laate, National Reform Party (NRP), Mr. Sylvester Mensah, National Democratic Congress (NDC), and Mr. Godfried Ako Nai, New Patriotic Party (NPP), expressed the views in separate interviews with the Ghana News Agency in Accra.

Mr. Laate said he was not happy that the list of such voters from outside the region was not provided by the Electoral Commission. They only voted after writing their names, service and voter ID card numbers.

He described those votes as foreign, saying: "who knows what will happen to the lists that are being compiled?"

According to Mr Mensah, the EC has not been able to address the issue of registration of officials who participate in the special voting.

He said there were similar experiences in 1992 and 1996 and the special voting list was always hand-written and not typed. Mr. Ako Nai said it is not proper to force someone to vote for a person he does not know.

Mr. Daniel Nixon Nkrumah, the returning officer, said all the security personnel from outside Accra were to vote at the Cantonment Police station. He said they were therefore allowed to vote after their names, service and ID card numbers were taken down.