Let us introduce The Electoral College System in Ghana

Feaature Article by David M.Kabzot Tembil

We need to introduce the Electoral College Votes system in Ghana to improve the Electoral Process in line with what takes place at the United States of America. We shall call it the Ghana Electoral College Votes system (The GEC vote s system).

If the proposal is accepted, the issues of percentages and fractions involved with the popular votes would be replaced by the Electoral College Votes system to elect the president. It will go a long way to remove the current litigation that borders on differences between percentages and significant figures calculated from popular votes. The next session of parliament should thus take this matter seriously.

The proposals are as follows:

1. There would be 275 Electoral College votes, equal to the number of Constituencies in Ghana

2. Each Region is assigned the number of Electoral College votes which matches the number of Constituencies in that region. For instance, Ashanti Region , 47 Electoral College votes and Upper East Region, 15 Electoral college votes.

3. A party or an Independent Presidential candidate that wins the majority of seats in a particular region takes all the Electoral College votes for that region. E.g. Nana Addo takes all the EC votes in Ashanti Region and Eastern Regions while Mahama takes the total of the votes from the other 8 regions.

4. A candidate shall win the election if he gets at least 138 Electoral College votes. There is no possibility of a tie, because 275 -138 = 137.

5. An example of a wining combination of regions :

Greater Accra, Western, Eastern and Ashanti regions:

Which gives: 34+ 26+33+47= 140 Electoral College Votes

6. At any time that the Electoral commission increases the number of constituencies in the country, parliament would amend the number of the winning number of Electoral College votes accordingly.

The table below illustrates the scenario from the just ended Elections in Ghana with only two parties considered:

Region Number of Constituencies Electoral College Votes Votes for

NDC( Mahama) Votes for

NPP (Nana Addo)

Ashanti 47 47 47

Brong Ahafo 29 29 29

Central 23 23 23

Eastern region 33 33 33

Greater Accra 34 34 34

Northern 31 31 31

Upper East 15 15 15

Upper West 11 11 11

Volta 26 26 26

Western 26 26 26

Total 275 275 195 ( Wins) 80 ( A Lost)

• The Electoral College system would make it very necessary for parties to work across the whole country

David M.Kabzot- Tembil

dmtembil@yahoo.com

Shashe River School

Private bag 001, Shashe

Botswana