Fussa City Mayoral Election : Lessons for Ghanaian elections (I)
I am in Japan attending the Japan International Co-operation Agreement (JICA) seminar on Democracy and Good Governance, Japan’s Experience and Practice. The theme for the seminar is Legislative and Electoral Administration.
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The objectives are to get participants from the other eight countries apart from Ghana, including Cambodia, Cote d’ ivoire, Egypt, Fiji, Guinea, Kyrgyz, Nepal and Thailand to learn from their host while sharing ideas to improve on governance and democracy in their country, from the perspective of leaders from the legislature, electoral commissions and media.
This is in line with the Japanese principle of sharing experiences without imposing their ideologies, a principle that is refreshing throughout the seminars. One of the sessions is to observe the preparation for and the conduct of elections of the Mayor of Fussa City.
Fussa City is located 40miles from central Tokyo and hosts one of the US Airbases in Japan, Yokota Air Base, that takes up about 30 per cent of the land size. The election is between the incumbent Mayor, Ikuo Kato who has served two eight year terms and seeking a third term and Mr. Nishimura who is supported by the Communist party. Both candidates are independent candidates. My focus is not on these candidates but the lessons that Ghana can draw from this trusting community members who have very high integrity.
Sense of community
The Japanese society has a strong sense of community, equality and integrity so people are trustworthy. Fussa City is one of the few cities that use police at their polling stations during elections. Even for that exercise, they are in mufti. The reason for the use of Police by the Fussa City is because traditionally there used to be agitations and protestation due to the presence of the US and their Base. This is one of the many decisions that local authorities can take on the way they run their elections. The autonomy and quality of the local government structure is another lesson that Ghana can learn from Japan.
One of my surprises on my trip to Japan is that the City of Tokyo uses Toyota Crown as their taxis, they are still modeled as the Crown we knew as children but look new and well- maintained. Also the Daihatsu Company is still manufacturing in Japan, making vehicles and other equipment. You do not see big vehicles in Japan, that is one of the recent phenomena that can be attributed to the aftermath of the last major earthquake, about five years ago.
Fussa city
We visited Fussa City a day before to observe the set up for the elections, learn the process including early voting for which we got data, just when the early voting closed on that Saturday. Speed of their operations and availability of information are other lessons. One of the lessons for me, at the setup of the polling station was the way everyone was involved in the process, there was no “big man” or labourers who were in charge of the set up.
The Superintendent of the polling centre, that is the returning or presiding officer of the polling station was involved in all the activities. They all worked in concert to complete the setup in record time. The reason is that the municipality needed to be efficient in the use of its resources, so they needed to use labour and time as efficiently as possible. The set up was done late in the day, as they were renting a gym and needed to limit the cost.
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The Japanese way of doing work is like an efficient and effective machine. Another big lesson you learn in Japan is their hard work, discipline, punctuality and cleanliness. For cleanliness, the focus is not cleaning up after you but ensuring that you did not create the trash in the first place.
The polished floor of the elementary school gym had to be protected, so they laid sheets on the polished floors where the voters will walk and they were limited to that space. For us the observers who will have to walk in uncovered parts of the gym we were provided slippers and we all had to take off our shoes and wear the slippers and everyone followed this simple rule to the letter.
The election process
The election is done by secret ballot. In Japan you cannot vote if you do not have a registered address and if you move to a new city you provide information about where you are moving from and where you have moved to. You become an eligible voter three months after registration. Post cards are sent by post to the registered address and of all eligible voters and they bring these post cards to the polling station on the day of voting to cast their ballots. The electoral list is compiled on a continuous basis and is closed few hours to the elections. No one tries to cheat the system, you will be caught and there is no “I beg”, as the laws work and they trust their police. It is interesting that as I am here in Japan, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Suzuki have been caught in rigging fuel-efficient data and an official of Mitsubishi has resigned because of this alleged scandal.
Their systems allow for early voting. Anyone who cannot be at the polling station on the day of the elections has six days before the election to go to the City Hall to cast his or her ballot. For the Fussa City it was from May 9-14 2016, with the Election Day being May 15. For this election there were exactly 3,000 early votes cast, made up of 1,417 men and 1,583 women. In the last mayoral election in 2012, there were a total of 2,245 early ballots. The total on the election list at the time of closing was 46,007 made up of 22,991 male and 23,016 female compared to 46,347 in 2012. Data is readily available and is constantly being analysed to see how to improve on their performance Kaizan.