The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has stated that it will take all measures within the confines of the electoral laws to secure a free, fair, transparent and credible elections.
As a first step the NDC had sought the assistance of EC officials who have trained 300 leading members of the party as trainer of trainers.
Briefing the Daily Graphic, the National Organiser of the NDC, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo said the agents had been taken through all the nitty gritties of the responsibilities and roles of polling agents of the party as guided by EC’s hand book for polling agents.
He said with the second phase, the 300 trainers have started the training of 28, 000 for the forthcoming voters registration it was the expectation of the party that it would train at least 120,000 election monitoring agent.
He expressed worry that although the EC hand book for party agents action eight call on the agents to be active, free, vigilant and protect the interests of their political parties as well as their agents, without interrupting the electoral process, but in most cases the polling agents were made to sit about four metres away from the scene.
This, Mr Ofosu-Ampofo said prevented the polling agents to pointing out double registration during registration exercise and double voting, impersonation and stuffing of ballot boxes because they were not allowed to get close to the polling station.
He recounted an incident at the Offinso bye-election, where the Member of Parliament for Lezdokuku, who was an NDC polling agent was arrested for interrupting the election process, because detected a malpractice going on and challenged it.
He called on the EC to bring together all stakeholders to come out with a blue-print on how election monitors can play their role meaningfully, but they were only confined to places far away from the polling station and only sign or otherwise when the process was over.
Mr Ofosu-Ampofo also suggested that EC should organise a joint training for political party polling agents, the security agencies and EC officials to educate them on the need for the political party agent to be given the opportunity to get close and point out irregularities.
He said another stakeholder whose activities has great bearing on whether the election would be free and fair was the media, especially the state owned media.
He said the state owned media were obliged by the 1992 constitution to provide equal access to all political parties, which he said the NDC had realised was not the case.