Ahead of the December general election, the Electoral Commission (EC) has announced the employment of Constituency/Regional Coalition Officers, as part of efforts to deliver free, fair, transparent and credible elections.
Dr Bossman Asare, Deputy Chairman in-charge of Corporate Services of the EC, said the recruitment of the new Constituency/Regional Coalition Officers, who were people with statistical and mathematical backgrounds, was to ensure timely and efficient coalition of election results.
“And there is something new we’ve also introduced in 2024, for each constituency, we’ve employed someone, who is going to work as a Coalition Officer,” Dr Bossman stated in Accra.
He was speaking at the official launch of Coalition of Domestic Election Observers’ (CODEO) election day observation activities and kick-off of its cascade training for observers for the December 2024 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections.
“The Commission has noticed that two days into the elections, our district officers, and returning officers don’t get to rest and these are the same people who will be doing the coalition on December 7th,” he said.
“So, we’ve decided that let’s employ people with statistical and mathematical backgrounds. So, for each constituency, we are going to have someone who will support the coalition and at the regional level, we are going to have that.”
Dr Bossman noted that when one looks at the structure of the Presidential Election, the Constitutional Instrument (CI) 127 allows regional coalition of Presidential Election Results.
He said for the presidential election, after the counting of votes at the polling stations, all the results from the polling stations would be taken to the Constituency Coalition Centres for coalition and that from the Constituency Coalition Centres, all presidential elections results would now go to the Regional Coalition Centres.
He said the Commission was going to announce presidential election results for each region, adding, “We will announce presidential results for each region.”
He said political parties were supposed to have their agents at the Polling Stations, Constituency Coalition Centres and Regional Coalition Centres.
He said the Commission took that decision because they wanted to increase the level of checks and balances in their processes; declaring that in 2020, we did that, it certainly supported the process”.
Dr Bossman reiterated that the Commission was very much convinced that this year’s process would be one of the best.
He said the number of voters in the voters’ register was 18.8 million.
Touching on polling stations, Dr Bossman said this year, the Commission was using 40,975 polling stations, out of which 328 of them were for the Special Voting Centres.
He said that the special voting would take place on December 2, 2024.
“So, we are going to use 328 Special Voting Centres for the Special Voting. For the main elections on December 7th, we are using 40,647 polling stations.”
He said for each polling station, the Commission would deploy five officials: A Presiding Officer, a Ballot Issuer for the parliamentary election, a Ballot Issuer for the presidential election, a Names Reference Officer and a Verification Officer.
Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the African Union (AU) High Representative for Silencing the Guns and Chairman of the AU High-Level Panel on Sudan, who performed the official launch of CODEO election day observation activities, appealed to Ghanaians to ensure peaceful and violent free elections.
“We have a track record that; yes, on our continent, in our sub-regions, when they are counting countries that are known for generally peaceful, credible elections, Ghana, we are up there. And we want to keep it up there.”
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