Ghanaians will be voting on December 7, 2020 in general elections. The keenly watched poll is a re-election push for the two main presidential candidates. Incumbent Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and former president John Dramani Mahama.
The winner will be serving their second and final term as president of one of Africa’s stable democracies. The vote is the eighth consecutive since the return to multi-party democracy in 1992.
The voting process
Ghana employs a series of processes in ensuring transparency, fairness and credibility of the polls.
The main elements include use of ballot papers, biometric verification processes, a secret ballot and transparent ballot boxes. The ballot papers are foldable sheets of paper bearing details of each candidate. It has three slots per candidate – the photo, the party’s symbol and a space for the thumbprint mark. Ballot papers are the basic voting material.
But before a person is handed the ballot paper, he or she must have presented their voters card at a polling station and gone through biometric identification process, which involves placing their finger on a biometric verification device (BVD).
If it fails to recognize their details, there is room for a manual process after the party officials and Electoral Commission, EC, are satisfied with the processes. A person with a stamped ballot then enters a voting booth where they are supposed to cast their ballot and fold their papers before dropping it in a transparent box set in the open.
Ghana previously used opaque boxes and with that there were reports of ballot stuffing in party strongholds especially, hence after a series of electoral reform proposals the transparent ballot boxes were adopted in 2000.
Major figures around the poll / declaring a winner
Over 17 million voters were registered in a contentious compilation of a new register earlier this year. The main opposition National Democratic Congress, NDC; called the move unnecessary but it was defended by the ruling New Patriotic Party.
The number of voters is two million up from the 15 million that were captured for the 2016 election. Being a general election, voters will elect a president and some 275 members of parliament across the 16 regions.
There are a total of 33,000 polling stations as against (over 28,000 stations in 2016) dotted across the country where the EC will be supervising affairs with security agencies to conduct the country’s eighth successive general election.
After voting, counting and collation takes place. The former at the polling station before certified figures are then transmitted to the constituency collation centers. From that point, parliamentary results are declared.
In the case of the presidential race, results are counted and transmitted to collation centers from where there is an onward transfer to the national collation center where the EC boss acts as a returning officer and thus the only person bound by law to declare a president-elect.
Ghana operates the usual 50%+1 rule for a c
