Amadu Sulley- EC Deputy Chair (left), Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah (right)
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) believes there is a grand scheme in place to rig the upcoming general election.
The suspicion comes in the wake of an alleged sneaking out of the plate used in printing some presidential ballot papers from the production house house – Innolink Ghana Limited – one of the several companies contracted by the Electoral Commission (EC) to print ballot papers for the elections. The company is said to be printing presidential ballot papers for the Greater Accra and the Volta Regions
The said plot was uncovered Monday evening by some party agents stationed at the printing house to supervise the printing and the dispatching processes of the ballot sheets to their final destinations.
Minutes after the detection, the news went viral on social media with NPP supporters massing up to the police station to register their anger.
Director of Elections of the NPP, Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, who made the issue public, said the plate which was used for printing the ballot papers at Innolink was sneaked out by an official of the printing firm to be given to an unknown person for whatever purposes they intended to use it.
He was of the belief that they wanted to use it to print additional ballot papers to be used in rigging the general election, which is barely two weeks away.
“The report was that the production manager, one Anderson, had handed over a production plate to a gentleman who entered and moved out with the plate. According to my agent, the plate that he saw was exactly the size of the presidential ballot. I immediately requested that he hand over the phone to the production manager, Anderson, so I could inquire about this,” he narrated in an interview on Citi FM.
Mr Adjei-Mensah Korsah noted, “When I got him on the phone, he admitted giving the plate to a gentleman who took it out of the place. Except that for over 10 minutes, he could not confirm or tell me exactly where the plate was, but after pushing for 10 minutes, he admitted it.”
This was part of the reasons he led a team of angry party youth to the police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) headquarters Monday evening to lodge an official complaint.
But upon reaching there, they were referred to the Cantonments Police Station where they managed to make a complaint and called for full-scale investigations since he considered the act a breach of the laws governing the printing of ballot papers.
“This story is not going to die. At the very least, we may have to destroy all those ballots there because it seems to suggest that it is hugely compromised. So we may have to work at it… everybody is alarmed, concerned, so we cannot treat this story lightly,” he charged.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu