The Electoral Commission (EC) has said it will publish procedures to address election anomalies for the 2024 election on its website.
The decision follows several calls from civil society organisations (CSO’s) to the EC to provide a standard guideline to address issues such as over-voting, re-count and re-collation to enhance transparency during the election.
Speaking at a forum with the Electoral Commission organised by the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG), the director of training at the EC, Serebuor Quaicoe said, ‘‘all the steps that will be used to address the anomalies are going to be put on our website. We are going to publish them on our website so that when you go on our website all the issues that I have listed, how they will be addressed will be found there’’.
Quaicoe said the EC always provides an election manual for its officers during elections but that is not made public, adding, ‘‘In addition to that we are going to develop what we call aide-memoire. Aide memoire is just like a post card, some small sheet [with] hardcover then we will list the steps on it, we will give it to our officers and our observers and the rest so that they can also hold and you can use that one to challenge anybody who tries to be mischievous or whatever’’.
The EC further stated it will publish polling station results on the website before the twenty-one-day period for filing petitions and also publish the constituency, regional and national results before the final declaration of the winner.
Meanwhile, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Democratic Governance, Prof. Kwesi Jonah has welcomed the decision by the Electoral Commission but asked ‘‘will you be able to do so within good enough time so that those candidates and parties who want to petition can do that easily’’.
He advised the EC to publish the polling station results at least two weeks before the twenty-one-day window for filing petitions so that parties and candidates who want to go to court can rely on the results to support their case.
The new policies of the EC on publication of results and guidelines on irregularities are part of the recommendations the Election Observation Missions made after the 2020 general election.
Reporting by Gemma Appiah in Accra
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