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The Electoral Commission (EC) is being urged by the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) to release the results of every polling station prior to announcing the final results of the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has heard electoral challenges related to Ghana’s presidential elections, alleging improper procedures at voting centers.
The 2020 election results were announced twice by the Electoral Commission, which has also come under fire for irregularities in the counting of results.
IDEG suggests that all polling place results be posted on the EC website in order to avoid similar incidents, which it believes pose a danger to the nation’s democracy.
Although Ghana’s democracy is listed as the sixth most stable in Africa, Senior Research Fellow at IDEG Kwesi Jonah recognized that the EC must embrace these steps in order to enhance Ghana’s standing.
“We know that there are certain weaknesses, certain lapses in our democracy and some of these weaknesses relate to the electoral process.
“The European Union which since 2012, has consistently observed elections in Ghana has always come out with certain recommendations to help us to reform in order to fast track our democracy and not to backtrack it.”
“One of them has to do with the publication of polling station by polling station results officially on the websites of the Electoral Commission,” he said.
He emphasized that by doing this, it avoids a scenario in which some political parties would claim to be in the dark about the outcome or to believe that the election was rigged.
“There is no serious political party that can say that we don’t have the results, polling station by polling station results because our system of elections is such that at every polling station, there are two agents for the political party, one for the presidential candidate, one for the parliamentary candidate,” he said.
To address these issues, the Electoral Commission said it is launching a number of changes in the meantime.
Political parties, according to Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, the commission’s director of training, must also be prepared to accept the findings.
Source: Ghanatodayonline.com
