The country is roughly 85 days away from the December 7 elections. Once again, the Electoral Commission (EC) is in the cross hairs of the main opposition party.
Barring any last-minute change of heart, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is planning a nationwide demonstration on Tuesday, September 17 dubbed: “Enough is Enough.” Per the hashtags on social media announcing the event, the demonstration seeks to – a) highlight the importance of protecting citizens’ vote; b) demand an audit of the voter’s register; and c) draw attention to why the upcoming election must be free and fair.
This brings back memories of the advocacy efforts by “Let My Vote Count” in the lead up to the 2016 election where there was a demand for a new voter’s register. The EC’s resistance to the call back then led to several narratives about its motives and whether it could be trusted to play a fair and impartial role in that election. In the end, and after a few court-resolved challenges, it delivered an election whose outcome has been scored as “completely free and fair” by high percentages of Ghanaians – 69 per cent (2017) and 65 per cent (2019) per data from the Afrobarometer survey.
Electoral contestations
We continue to witness two types of electoral contestations. The first tends to focus on the administrative processes leading up to election day such as – registration of voters, exhibition of the provisional register, producing a credible voter’s register, resolution of discrepancies, among others. The second deals with election outcomes where a) the result is disputed and rejected by a contesting part, and b) the seeking of a legal remedy from the courts to resolve the contestation. Two of our elections have witnessed the ultimate contestation –2012 (contested by the New Patriotic Party) and 2020 (contested by the National Democratic Congress) presidential elections.
In both cases, the Supreme Court validated the results of the election, rejecting the contestations of the losing party. The resort to democratic practices and avenues (courts, demonstrations) to resolve our electoral contestations must be commended. In the same breath, we must condemn those occasions where acts of violence have been committed as part of these contestations.
Political parties are free to raise questions about the processes leading to an election and if there are concerns that need addressing, the EC cannot afford the luxury of ignoring them.
However, it appears that these contestations are intensifying from election to election. It is also coming at a very challenging time for Ghana’s democracy. I say so for two reasons.
First, Ghanaians are expressing a loss of trust in the EC at levels never seen before. This has not always been the case. Between Afrobarometer Round 1 (1999) and Round 3 (2005), the percentage of Ghanaians expressing “a lot” of trust in the EC significantly improved from 32 per cent to 50 per cent. However, between Round 3 (2005) and Round 9 (2022), that percentage has significantly declined by 40 percentage points (50 per cent to 10 per cent). Are our electoral contestations chipping away at citizen’s trust in the institution? What explains this declining trust?