EC’s Claim Of Saving Ghana ¢523m ‘False, Baseless’ – ASEPA

The Alliance for Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA) has rubbished claims by the Electoral Commission that it saved the country ¢523million following the 2020 polls.

According to ASEPA, the ‘misleading’ claim is an attempt to “whitewash the EC’s image as a reckless spender.”

In a press release, the Civil Society Organisation noted that after the EC’s insistence on having a new voters’ register, the Ministry of Finance gave them ¢444,864, 663 to conduct the exercise.

They were further given ¢287,842,995 to conduct the December 7 general election.

“The sum of these two expenditures will give you GH¢760,074,169. It is this amount that the EC divided the total number of registered voters which is 16.9 m to get the GH¢40.78 it claims to have spent on each voter in 2020.”

“However the EC deliberately failed to add the $24 million it’s spent to procure new BVDs and BVRs and the $74.6m it spent to build a new data centre all in 2020 the cost of the elections,” parts of the statement read.

“This means that the EC spends a total of GH¢76.9 per voter in 2020, an excess of GHC116 million more than the cost of the 2016 general elections,” ASEPA added.

ASEPA urged Ghanaians to disregard the cost-saving claim as “fictitious”, “baseless” and a “mere propaganda” by the election management body that is not backed by the facts.

Source: GhanaFeed.com