Former President Rawlings says the current mistrust in the country over the compilation of a new voters’ register could sour the 2020 general elections. The former President said this when the Inter-Party Resistance Against New Voter Register (IPRAN) petitioned him to seek his counsel in their quest to stop the Electoral Commission from compiling a new register ahead of the 2020 elections.

A delegation of the coalition, led by Peoples National Convention (PNC) National Chairman, Bernard Mornah, who met the former President at his office on Tuesday, said the Electoral Commission’s “refusal to listen to wise counsel particularly from persons who have participated in the electoral process for a very long time has led to very painful but wrong decisions”.

The coalition said while the Electoral Commission may have a mandate to compile a new register, “The mandate must be within reasonable limits. The mandate of leadership is vested in the people and the Ghanaian people are saying that apply some economic reasoning. We are telling the Electoral Commission that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!”

Detailing the group’s stance against the Electoral Commission’s proposal, the PNC Chairman said during the last local government elections there was a 0.6 failure rate with the use of the existing biometric equipment and questioned why based on such a high-efficiency rate, the Commission would wish to replace equipment and also do away with 17 million names in the voter database.

Mornah said Civil Society organisations had gone into the market and done an assessment of the features the Electoral Commission intends to introduce and realized that the Commission’s budget of $833 million is 60 per cent above budget.