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The New Patriotic Party (NPP) which has alleged that there are names of over 76,000 Togolese in the Ghana’s voters register has said the party will soon submit the evidence to the Commission soon.

Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyapong, the General Secretary of the party, said it was unfortunate that the Electoral Commission was seeking further evidence from the NPP. He wondered why the EC cannot obtain the national voters register of Togo to compare it with Ghana’s voters register.

Mr Agyapong who last Friday took serious exceptions to remarks made by Dr David Percy, a leading member of the National Reform Party (NRP) said, “We have presented our case to you and you have access to all registers, I don’t see why you should be pressing us to give you our evidence.”

In swift reaction, Mrs Charlotte Osei, the chairperson of the Commission said in unravelling the allegations, he who alleges must prove. “In our local parlance, we say that the onus lies on the one who alleges. Since you have alleged, the onus lies on you to provide the evidence and that is why we have written to you since October 19 and you have not given us the documents,” she said.

However after the forum, Mr Peter Mac Manu, the former chairman of the NPP who led the party to make their presentations, said the party would soon present evidence supporting its claim that some foreign nationals have been registered on Ghana’s voters’ register to the Electoral Commission (EC). The NPP had cited names of about 13,000 Burkinabes in the country’s voters’ register.

This is in addition to the over 78,000 Togolese nationals it had earlier alleged were contained in the register but the EC during a stakeholders forum on the voters’ register on Friday, challenged the party to substantiate its claims with evidence. The EC Chairperson Charlotte Osei also requested the NPP to furnish the commission with a copy of the Togolese register.

“We are not scared. We have the register, we submitted it. We showed portions of the register to the general public at the Alisa Hotel…We have the register so we will send it, no problem”, Mr Mac Manu said. He wondered why the EC decided to visit Kenya and South Africa to find out about the voter population but failed to visit Togo-the country the NPP had cited in relation to the bloated voters’ register.

“What is strange about the whole issue is that, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission says she went to Kenya to find out about their voter population vis-a-vis the entire Kenyan population, she went to South Africa to find out about the voter population there and she could not go to Togo for the Togolese register. That is quite an awkward thing to me.”

Most of the political parties at the just ended forum asked the Commission to rather audit the register instead of creating a new one but Mr. Manu believes the process of auditing the current register will be cumbersome.

“If we are going to do an audit , how are we also going to audit the system’s failure because many of the issues that pop up in double and multiple registrations arose out of faulty software or faulty computer system” he argued.

Asked whether the NPP will consider softening its entrenched position on getting a new voters’ register, he said the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) will have to “meet and decide.”