EC ready for general election
The Electoral Commission (EC) says it is fully ready for the December 7 general election. It said all the measures and mechanisms that must be put in place to ensure a successful election had been done.
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A Deputy Commissioner of the EC, Dr Eric Bossman Asare, who disclosed this, said in terms of officials for each of the 40,649 polling stations they were currently working with, they would engage five individuals, namely a presiding officer, a ballot issuer for the presidential election, a ballot issuer for the parliamentary, a verification officer and a names reference officer.
Additionally, he said they were going to engage the services of three returning officers for each constituency — a returning officer and two deputy returning officers.
Apart from these, he said every constituency would have a minimum of four technicians but for places with more numbers, they would have up to a maximum of eight technicians.
He was speaking during a panel discussion organised by the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) on the theme: Towards democratic consolidation: strengthening inclusion, transparency and credibility in the 2024 Ghana's election.
He was responding to a question from the moderator of the panel discussion, Dr Nana Asantewaa Afadzinu, who is also the Executive Director of WACSI, on EC’s preparedness for a transparent and credible election.
Collation officers
Dr Asare added that one new thing the commission was introducing in this year’s election had to do with collation officers, explaining that the EC was employing people with a background in statistics and mathematics to support the collation exercise at the various constituencies.
“The commission is also ensuring that only people who are accredited will be allowed to the coalition centres. We noticed that in 2020, people who were not accredited got the opportunity to be there and it created a lot of chaos,” he added.
On the voter register, he said at a meeting with the political parties, they concluded that there would be an online exhibition of the register.
Extolling Ghana’s voter register, he said as of 2020, Ghana was the only country in West Africa that had 85 per cent of all eligible voters on the voter’s register followed by Cape Verde with about 83 per cent and the others were doing about 70 per cent.
“So clearly, this is an indication that there is something the Electoral Commission in Ghana is doing in terms of registration of voters which other countries in the sub-region are not doing,” he said.