The Ashanti Regional Director of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mr Benjamin Bannor Bio has disclosed that a voter by name Sheriff Abubakar at the Asawase Constituency is in police custody for trying to discredit the efforts of the Commission through importation of imitated ballot papers.

According to him, the perpetrator was in the process of voting at the Baba Lati base polling station when a polling agent alerted the presiding officer of his suspicion. He narrated that as Abubakar was going through the process and been watched, ready to cast his vote for the parliamentary candidates, he was spotted trying to sneak in foreign papers from his pocket into the ballot box and was immediately apprehended.

Mr Bannor informed that he took interest in the matter after the suspect was found with five ballot papers and decided to find out where it came from, and as he visited Honorable Muntaka Mohammed, Member of Parliament at the Asawase Constituency, they realised that the ballot papers were fake, printed by an unknown person to discredit the process.

“It’s faint, light and not like our ballot paper so as the colours, which does not bear the serial number of the EC. Their ballot paper had the constituency code of Asawase which is wrong," Mr Bannor revealed at a press conference in Kumasi on Monday night.

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“Electoral Commission’s ballot paper has watermark but this is just an ordinary piece of paper used in making this dummy aimed at the parliamentary ballot box.

“We want to make it clear to the general public that the commission system has in-built integrity hence his detection and arrest,” he said.

He further revealed that elsewhere in one of the Polling stations at Kwadaso, an officer was detained after a voter reported him for not validating his ballot paper, a case which has been resolved after investigations were conducted earlier for trustworthiness sake.

“There was an incident at Kwadaso where a lady complained that her paper was not validated after casting her vote. We made the police to apprehend the officer in charge. Incidentally, at the end of the poll, we realised that all the papers were recognized as validated and the case has been resolved,” he said.

He still assured that the EC will achieve its 24-hour feat to announce the final results to Ghanaians despite the disruption of the rain in some parts of the Ashanti Region and Ghana.