Publish polling station results on your website before declaration of final results -IDEG to EC

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EC Boss, Jean Mensah

The Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) is urging the Electoral Commission (EC) to publish the results of all polling stations before declaring the final results of the upcoming 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.

Ghana’s presidential polls have witnessed electoral petitions at the Supreme Court in recent years based on allegations of faulty processes at polling stations.

The Electoral Commission has also been criticised for declaring the 2020 election results twice due to result tallying anomalies.

To prevent such occurrences, which IDEG deems a threat to the country’s democracy, the institute recommends that all polling station results be published on the EC’s website.

Senior Research Fellow at IDEG, Kwesi Jonah, acknowledged that although Ghana’s democracy is ranked as the sixth most stable in Africa, it is essential for the EC to adopt these measures to improve the country’s position.

“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 stressed that this way, it prevents the situation where some political parties would say that they do not have the result or the perspective that, the election has been 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.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission says it is initiating several reforms to address these concerns.

However, the Director of Training for the commission Dr Serebour Quaicoe says political parties must also be willing to accept outcome of results.