Honorary Vice President of IMANI-Africa, Bright Simons, has stated that the Electoral Commission (EC) has not been entirely honest about electoral expenditures.

According to him, organising elections in Ghana has always been very expensive, and he therefore does not understand why the Commission was insisting that it spent $7.7 per voter in the 2020 elections.

Speaking on JoyNews Newsfile on May 4, Simons stated that in 2020, the country spent approximately GH₵1.2 billion to organise the elections.

This figure, he said, when calculated, means that approximately $12.5 is spent on each voter. Which he said was relatively high.

“The $7.7 that he uses, if you go to look at the records in the ministry of Finance, Parliament, public records, you will see how much money we spent in total in 2020 as GH₵1.36 billion. If we compare what we spent years before we had no elections, you can then subtract as they do, you establish how much they spent because of the elections.

“Take the years before we had the elections; say 2019, 2018, then you get to 2020 when we have elections. You look at the difference in terms of budget amount allocated to the EC. When you get that number it is about almost GH₵1.2 billion then you divide it by the total number of registered voters for that election and you strike an average, you get $12.5 not $7.7," he said.

His comments were in response to claims by the Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission (EC), Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, that the EC spent $7.7 per voter in 2020.

"If you look at our cost for 2020, in comparative terms if you take 2016 the unit cost per person was $13.3 but if you take 2020 it was $7.7," he had said.

However, the the Honorary Vice President of IMANI said the outfit conducted a detailed analysis of some claims of the EC, which turned out to be untrue.

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Mr Simons' noted that “This is the highest we have ever seen and one of the highest in the world. so when they tell you, its $7.7 either you do the maths yourself or you take their word for it,” he said.

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