The Importance of the Polling Agent

By Fredua Dankwa Jr.

A person authorized to ACT on another's behalf is known as an agent, consequently a polling agent is the representative of a party or it's candidate at a polling station to ensure that the represented entity's interest is upheld.

Whilst preparing to train (NDC) party agents and candidates ahead of the 2012 general elections, I occasionally marvelled at the extent to which the party's Electoral Directorate was overly motivated to expend every resource by way of logistics, training materials and human efforts to examine and explain all facets of the electoral processes as pertaining to the EC's guidelines, I thought it was a bit of an over-kill, now, in hindsight I completely appreciate the reasoning and wisdom for over-stretching the training exercise. I can now confidently and unequivocally say that NDC polling agents were "over-trained" for all intended purposes.

Whilst I will admit to only sparingly watching the on-going tedious supreme court election petition, I am amazed at the level of naivety of the role of the polling agents in elections; as being displayed by the petitioners' star witness Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. Then again, I guess feigning ignorance to bolster one's case in court is definitely a great strategy huh? Mere observers?? Really?? I quite remember emphasizing to the agents I trained to adhere to the EC's mandate of not signing the declaration forms if they had ANY reservations about how the voting process went on, and by refusing to sign, they had to fill out a portion on the form detailing their reasons for refusing to sign.

How disingenuous is it to declare in one breath that "you and I were not there" and turn around to imply that the hard-working, party faithful who got up early and sacrificed their safety and possibly regular livelihoods to stand in for you and your party were simply 'too stupid' to appreciate or understand what was happening at the polling station, albeit your lackadaisical approach to their training.

Maybe, the silver-lining in the on-going supreme court deliberations is that serious political parties will begin to take seriously the preparation and training of their polling agents since "you and I will not be everywhere". The morale of the story is that elections are won or lost at the polling station and not on rally grounds, I will also suggest to you that one party obviously over-prepared for the battle than the other.

This wishfully hoping that just by a stroke of luck or technicality, a panel of nine judges will overturn the declared results and throw the sanctity of a nation into disarray is just that - wishful thinking, or what in American football is known as 'Hail Mary' when at the last second of a game the ball is thrown to the end zone by the losing team in desperation, hoping that it will be caught for a (score) touch down, or a low-probability pass attempted at the end of a game when a team is too far from the end zone to execute a more conventional play. Good luck.