What is the EC’s problem? The toughest part of the EC’s mandate is organizing our public elections up until the ballots are counted at polling stations across the country.
Once all polling station data are out, that hard part of the EC’s job is done.
From that point on, it becomes a simple arithmetic task of aggregating the polling station data to obtain constituency-level and national-level totals per candidate. This aggregation job is one that private media houses, political parties, candidates, civil society groups, and any interested person with access to the polling station data can do.
Instructively, the one candidate with arguably the greatest personal stake in the outcome of the presidential elections, incumbent vice president and candidate of the NPP Dr. Mahmood Bawumia, has commendably conceded the elections and congratulated his principal rival.
How, then, is an entire EC, a body with disproportionately more resources and access to all the primary data, unable to accomplish this simple mechanical task hours after most other elections stakeholders are done doing that same task? Are our elections won and lost at the polling station or at the so-called collation center or some other place?
The EC has made itself, over the course of time, far more significant and influential in the outcome of our elections than it actually is. Once polling is over and the ballots counted and certified transparently, the people’s will is firmly determined, and the EC can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to change that.
Thus, all this game of keeping an anxious nation constantly on edge and in suspense, election after election, long after polling station data are complete, is needless and, frankly, irresponsible. It amounts to a vain attempt to make it appear as though the EC are the kingmakers in our elections when that power rightfully belongs exclusively to Ghanaian voters.
The EC is only the people’s agent in announcing the outcomes of our elections, as those outcomes have been expressed in the votes of the people cast and validated at polling stations across the length and breadth of the country.
The leadership of the EC must get off their high horses and do without further delay what is, essentially, a ministerial or administrative duty to announce officially to the nation and for the records the results of the December 7 general elections that we all already know. They have no choice or discretion in the matter.
