The Electoral Commission (EC) has disclosed that political parties disagreed with proposals to close polls at 3 pm instead of 5 pm, during the upcoming 2024 general elections.
Following suggestions from election observers, the EC proposed for the 2024 polls to end at 3 pm to enhance transparency and orderly collation of votes by electoral officers in broad daylight.
According to the EC Chairperson, Jean Mensa, the proposal is grounded in the lessons learned from the 2020 elections, where approximately 70 percent of voting centres witnessed minimal activity by 1:00 pm.
This, she said is due to the establishment of multiple polling centres, which expedited the process.
READ ALSO: Election 2024: EC Justifies Proposal To Close Polls At 3pm.
However, the Director of Training at the EC, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, explained that during engagements, political parties blatantly rejected the suggestions.
He disclosed this in his address at a seminar organised by the Institute for Democratic Governance, themed, “EC Procedures for Electoral Disputes and Publication of Election Results.”
“We had wanted to close elections by 3 o’clock because our understanding and thinking is that most of the confusion occurs at night. And now that we have decided that no polling station should have more than 750 voters, some time ago some used to have even 2000 at a polling station.
“In 2020, the threshold was 749, this time 750. No polling station will have more than 750 voters. And with this, it should not take us three hours, if everybody was to be there on time. The ones who are able to do the threshold, we should be able to finish on time. And from experience, counting does not go beyond 2 hours.
“Voting ends by 3 o’clock, by 5, we should have finished the polling station results. So it will now be left with the transmission of the results. But when we met our colleagues, they said, for this year we shouldn’t touch the law.”