The Ghana Police Service, in collaboration with the Eastern Regional Elections Security Taskforce, has supervised the destruction of over 3.6 million defective ballot papers originally intended for both the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Eastern Region.

The exercise, carried out on Tuesday, December 3, was conducted under the strict supervision of constituency election directors from all political parties. These representatives monitored the process from the various armories where the ballots were stored to the regional dump site on the Akwadum road, where the papers were destroyed.

The defective ballot papers led to the Electoral Commission (EC) suspending the Special Voting exercise for the Eastern and Western regions. With the exception of the Afram Plains North and South Constituencies, all 31 other constituencies in the Eastern Region presented their presidential and parliamentary ballots for destruction.

Speaking to Citi News, Eastern Regional Director of the EC, John Appiah Baffour, expressed satisfaction with the process. "The exercise has been very successful. Actually, we brought all the parties together and the constituency executives of the NPP, NDC, and CPP, and all of them have been here. They checked the seals on the ballot paper bags, and they saw that everything was intact before we offloaded them and burned them. So it has been very successful," he stated.

The NDC Eastern Regional Secretary, Jamal Korneh, who engaged the media also noted that the process was well-executed despite initial disagreements.

"We agreed that the ballot papers should be conveyed to the police station. When we got to the police headquarters today, they wanted to store them in the Zoomlion containers, but we disagreed with that. So, we brought everything here. So far, so good — we’ve been able to check all the seals, emptied all the bags, and proceeded with setting fire to the ballot papers that have been rejected by the EC," he said.