Election 2024: EC to publish guidelines on irregularities

The Electoral Commission (EC) will, for the first time, publish on its website the guidelines for the conduct of the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections for the resolution of any irregularities that may occur during the counting and collation process.

They include the handling of over-voting, mismatched reconciliation and incomplete or incorrectly filled-in results forms.

Context

In every election, the EC establishes guidelines which is made available only to election officers but this time around it would be published on the commission’s website for all to access.

Apart from publishing the guidelines on its website, the commission would develop it into a postcard that would be made available to election officers and observers during the election period.

The detailed polling station results, including results from all levels of collation, would be published on its website before the expiry of the 21-day deadline for filing election petitions.

This is to enable those who intend to file election petitions to challenge results at the law courts to do so in good time by using the official results.

Forum

The Director of Training at the EC, Dr Serebour  Quaicoe, made this known at a forum organised by the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG) last Friday in Accra on clear guidelines and procedures for election officers.

Attended by representatives of the various political parties, civil society organisations and the media, the forum was to provide a platform for the EC to brief participants on the clear guidelines for addressing potential irregularities during the counting and collation process of the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The discussion at the forum formed part of the 18 recommendations put forward by the European Union Election Observation Mission after the 2020 elections to address critical issues to strengthen Ghana’s democratic framework.

EC

“We are promising that for the 41,000 polling station results, because of the quantum of work, we need some days to work on them before we publish them.

For the constituency, the regional and national ones will be published before we declare the results,” he said.

Dr Quaicoe explained that before all the 41,000 polling station results would be uploaded onto the EC website, they must be scanned, which would take some days but he assured that the EC would be able to do so before the 21-day deadline for filing the election petitions against the results.

IDEG

Welcoming the participants, the Head of Operations, IDEG, Patrick Richard Okine, said the upcoming 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections were crucial hence the need to address the challenges observed during the 2020 elections to ensure a credible, fair and peaceful election.

Consequently, he said, IDEG held the forum to discuss the key recommendations as the country prepared for the 2024 elections.

A Senior Research Fellow, Advocacy and Institutional Relations, IDEG, Mr Kwesi Jonah, for his part, urged the EC to incorporate the guidelines in the training of the political parties polling agents so that they would become aware that in case of any irregularity, they would know how it would be resolved.