The Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) has called on the Electoral Commission (EC) to ensure transparency in the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections by publishing the results from all polling stations before announcing the final outcomes.
In recent years, Ghana’s presidential elections have faced legal challenges at the Supreme Court, with accusations of flawed processes at polling stations.
The Electoral Commission also faced criticism for issuing two different declarations of the 2020 election results due to discrepancies in result tallying.
IDEG views such incidents as potential threats to the stability of Ghana’s democracy and suggests that making polling station results publicly available on the EC’s website could prevent similar issues.
Kwesi Jonah, a Senior Research Fellow at IDEG, emphasized the importance of these measures, noting that while Ghana’s democracy is considered the sixth most stable in Africa, there is still room for improvement.
“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 this approach would prevent political parties from claiming they lack access to the results or from suggesting 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 is implementing various reforms to address these issues. However, the commission’s Director of Training, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, emphasized that political parties must also be prepared to accept the results.