2024 Presidential Election: The balloting was not random and independent – Prof. Mensah slams EC

Senior lecturer at the University of Ghana, Prof Lord Mensah has criticised the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) over the ballot it conducted for the 2024 presidential election, on September 20, 2024.

According to the academic, the balloting by the commission was not as random and independent as it should have been.

He was bemused by the fact that the EC allowed political parties to draw their position on the ballot before independent presidential aspirants were permitted.

Prof Mensah, the Executive Director at the Centre for Investment Advisory and Sustainable Finance, indicated that the process used by the EC gave some of the presidential aspirants undue advantage over the others.

He said that all the aspirants should have been allowed to draw their position on the ballot paper simultaneously and not segregated.

“I don't know the objective of the EC, whether they had wanted to make the balloting random and independent pick or sequence the pick and limit the sample space for the second, third and the other political parties.

“Going by random pick, all the political parties should have dipped their hands in the polytene to pick at the same time. With the current process, apart the first pick who has the right sample space, the rest will not have the same sample advantage. They will have a reduced sample after the first pick since the balloting was without replacement.

“To avoid repeated picks, it wouldn't have been possible to do the ballot with replacement, but it would have been fair to allow the parties to pick at the same time. This would have allowed the same sample spaced,” he wrote in a statement shared on X on September 21, 2024.

He added, “Even after picking, the EC shouldn't have allowed them to sit close to each other and compare their picks, just to emphasize on the independence.”

Read his full statement below:

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