By: Ama Gyamfuah
For the first time, the Electoral Commission (EC) will publish the guidelines for conducting the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections on its website. This move aims to address and resolve any irregularities that may arise during the counting and collation process.
The guidelines will cover issues such as handling over-voting, reconciling mismatched results, and addressing incomplete or incorrectly filled-in results forms.
In previous elections, the EC has established guidelines that were only available to election officers. This time, however, the guidelines will be published on the commission’s website for public access.
Additionally, the EC will create a postcard version of the guidelines to distribute to election officers and observers during the election period.
The detailed polling station results, including those from all levels of collation, will be published on the EC’s website before the 21-day deadline for filing election petitions.
This will allow individuals who wish to challenge the results in court to do so promptly, using the official results.
Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, the Director of Training at the EC, announced this at a forum organized by the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG) in Accra, where clear guidelines and procedures for election officers were discussed.
The forum, attended by political party representatives, civil society organizations, and the media, was designed to update participants on the guidelines for addressing potential irregularities during the counting and collation of the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.
This discussion was part of the 18 recommendations from the European Union Election Observation Mission following the 2020 elections, aimed at addressing key issues to enhance Ghana’s democratic framework.
“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.