Political parties reach consensus on over-voting

The 10-member committee tasked to make recommendations for electoral reforms in the country has reached a consensus on ‘over-voting’ - one of the most controversial subjects of election outcomes in recent times - and has made far-reaching proposals to address the matter.

The committee has, however, recommended, among others, that in an event where total ballots cast outnumber the number of issued ballot papers or total registered voters at a particular polling station, initial attempt will be made to reconcile all the serial numbers of the ballots in the box with the ballot booklet and the ‘foreign material(s)’ isolated. The rest will then be counted and declared as valid.

It is only when this administrative procedure fails to identify the ‘foreign material’ in the ballot box that the votes in that polling station can be declared as ‘over-voting’ and a report made to the chairman of the Electoral Commission for it to annul the election at that particular polling station.

“So you don’t just conclude that merely because you have excess ballot papers in the ballot box, you are annulling the elections at the polling station. You go through certain administrative measures to attempt to isolate the ballot paper that shouldn’t be in the box,” Mr Christian Owusu Perry, Director of Public Affairs at the EC and Secretary to the Committee, explained to The Finder in an interview.

The recommendations span the pre-election, election and post-election periods of the country’s electoral cycle.

The committee, which presented its work to the Electoral Commission last Friday, made other key recommendations on one of the controversial subjects surrounding the conduct of the 2012 general elections and which played out significantly at the election petition hearing at the Supreme Court.

The petitioners sought, among other reliefs, for the court to annul votes in stations where the total ballots cast outnumbered the total number of registered voters in that particular polling station.

The court did not grant those reliefs, perhaps, due to the lack of a clear definition of what constituted ‘over-voting’ and clear guidelines for addressing such occurrences. The court, however, recommended some electoral reforms to address such challenges in subsequent elections.

On the subject of ‘no verification no vote,’ the committee came to the conclusion that the policy is to be maintained, to help safeguard against manipulation of the elections.

It, however, proposed that verification is done during the period when the voters’ register is on exhibition.

It is suggested that because there are genuine experiences of people not being able to be verified by the machines on election day, provisions must be made at the exhibition of the voters’ register, where people are verified and necessary arrangements made for those who could genuinely not be verified by the machines.

“If they are not able to go through the verification even though they are the same persons who registered, they would be entered as face only on the register; so on election day, there may not be a cause for verification,” Mr. Perry explained.

It is the view of the committee that it is better to have just a few people not voting than to have the whole system compromised by opening the floodgate on allowing non-verified persons to vote on election day.

Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Chairman of the Electoral Commission, who received the report, said the commission will consider the recommendations made in the report and take appropriate actions on them.

He emphasised that those that require legal backing cannot be done by the Electoral Commission and would have to be referred to the law-making institution to handle.

“Those that are administrative are the ones that will be looked at very carefully by the members of the commission together with other stakeholders,” he said.

He also stated that contrary to assertions by a section of the public that the Supreme Court, in its ruling in the 2012 election petition, ordered the Electoral Commission to undertake electoral reforms, no such orders were made by the court.

He noted that, regrettably, some people have accused the EC of refusing to act on the recommendations of the Supreme Court to institute electoral reforms. “I am happy that they talk about recommendations because the Supreme Court did not issue any orders for electoral reforms.”

He was emphatic about the fact that, “Courts adjudicate conflicts over elections; they do not run elections.”

He was particularly happy that some of the recommendations proposed by the Supreme Court have been carefully looked at by the committee.

“I can assure the committee that their proposal will be seriously considered and appropriate action taken,” he said.

Mr. Afari-Gyan also emphasised that the committee’s work remains a proposal and that the EC remains the final authority in deciding on the issues.

But General Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress(NDC), Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia told The Finder the EC would have to give a convincing reason as why it will decide not to implement a particular recommendation in the report.

The General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, Mr Kwabena Agyepong, was, however, absent at the meeting but sent his Director of Administration to represent him, for which reason the report did not have all the signatures needed to make it an authentic document for public consumption.