2024 elections: Post results online before declaration – IDEG urges EC

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

IDEG believes that this step is crucial as recent presidential elections in Ghana have faced legal challenges and allegations of errors at polling stations.

Additionally, the EC has faced criticism for declaring the 2020 election results twice due to tallying issues.

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 emphasized that publishing all polling station results would prevent political parties from claiming they lack access to results or alleging election rigging.

“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.