Don’t allow cameras at polling booths – Speaker urges EC

The Speaker of Parliament Professor Mike Ocquaye has charged the Electoral Commissioner to device means to prevent voters from taking cameras along during voting.

“If you want to prevent vote buying, it’s one of the ways of doing so because that’s one of the reasons why the vote must be secret."

“You take a vote by way of your thumbprint and it shows you voting in a certain direction and you go to show it to a person by a pre-arranged system or plan, and you are paid for, that is stealing”, he noted at a forum in Accra.

He added: “In other words, it allows the doing of a wrong and that’s why we must regulate our laws very seriously to cover all dimension of the activity that will make it an offense.

Meanwhile, the chairperson of Ghana’s Electoral Commission, Jean Mensa, has stated that allowing development partners to partly fund the country’s election is wrong.

According to her, the tendency of depending on donors to help fund the cost of elections in Ghana usually compromises the independence of the elections.

She also lamented the high cost of conducting elections in the country, saying: “Our elections are fast becoming very expensive ventures where we constantly rely on our development partners to partly fund our elections thereby compromising our independence.”

She advocated during her speech at the 17th International Electoral Affairs Symposium that measures be put in place to minimize the country’s dependence on development partners to fund its elections.