EC to punish staff implicated in election malpractices

Jul 30, 2016

Geoffrey Ekanya, the former MP for Tororo North, who won an election petition recently, said the mess in the elections was brought about by corruption among district election officials.

The Electoral Commission (EC) will take tough administrative measures against its officials who have been implicated in the Parliamentary election malpractices by the courts of law.
 
"We are just waiting for the Court of Appeal verdicts in the election petitions since many MPs have appealed to take the necessary administrative measures against our staff," Deputy EC chairperson, Joseph Biribonwa said.  

Over 20 MPs have been thrown of Parliament on several grounds including inflation of the figures on the declaration forms, voter intimidation, bribery and forged academic papers.

Biribonwa said EC will also conduct a thorough postmortem of the Parliamentary elections to ascertain what exactly went wrong. He said the postmortem will be the basis for making the necessary changes.

Several politicians who petitioned court after losing in the February 18 Parliamentary elections accused EC officials in district of surrendering their roles to other state institutions, like Police.

Geoffrey Ekanya, the former MP for Tororo North, who won an election petition recently, said the mess in the elections was brought about by corruption among district election officials.

Ekanya noted that some EC officials colluded with the powerful politicians and state institutions to rig the election. But Biribonwa said that EC does not condone election malpractices.

On claims that EC appointed partisan staff to man the Parliamentary elections, Biribonwa said they use the public service guidelines to recruit staff and that many of them have prior experience in conducting elections.

Biribonwa also said that it's the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) not EC that should explain how they cleared candidates to join the Parliamentary race without the required papers.

NCHE officials have appeared in most of the election petitions in court to defend themselves on the failure to verify candidates' academic papers as required by law.

Livingstone Sewanyana, the executive director of Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) told the New Vision that the huge volume of election petitions confirms what they (local election observers) wrote in their 2016 general election report.
 
Both local and international observers noted that the 2016 elections fell short of the standards of a free and fair election.

But Biribonwa said that Sewanyana is unfair to connect issues of MPs who are losing seats over inadequate academic papers to the election observe reports yet they never raised the issue in the reports.

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