The 18-point proposal to improve election results
E. Ablorh-Odjidja

December 02, 2013

After almost a year of political drama and trauma in 2013, the Petition Case in Ghana came to a close. No matter how unsatisfactory the result, all accepted the decision by the Supreme Court. But most to this day, are in agreement that our electoral process is flawed.

Last week the political parties in parliament, and the IEA, presented an 18-point proposal to the Electoral Commission for reforms within the electoral process, with the aim of avoiding in the future the headaches from 2013.

The proposal presented, however, has its own inherent danger; the size and the reach of the 18 points offer plenty of opportunities for debate, confusion and inertia.

Instead of a clear, one or two bullet approach, easy to implement and supervise, we have this load of head-scratching affair.

Central to the Petition Case, after 2013 election, was obviously the over-voting.

To curb the constant occurrence of over-votes in our elections, biometric registration was instituted prior to the elections. It failed.

Simply stated, some citizens were allowed to vote even though they were not biometrically registered.

The odd voters could only do so because of some official acquiescence or malfeasance.  And not because they had been born within the short span between the end of the biometric campaign and the elections, and suddenly became mature enough to vote on the day of the elections!

This over-vote condition in our elections is troublesome. 

We need a clean break from the occurrences: A requirement by law for a system that does not allow over-votes; one that triggers automatic re-voting and/or cancellation of the results in constituencies with margins of votes that exceed what is registered.

Obviously, the key requirement in the above set-up is an efficient biometric registration system.

A system that clearly and cleanly identifies qualified voters, that also allows each qualified citizen his one vote.

The approach to the solution must be deliberate and mechanical.

The lengthy approach offered by the political parties and the IEA, reported by Ghana Business News article of November 27, 2013, overstates the solution:

“The 18-point proposals include provisions that the EC work with defined programmes and published timelines to ensure certainty in the implementation of the programmes. They also recommended that there must be a fixed number of constituencies to be reviewed periodically in accordance with the law and in line with population movement. According to the IEA and the political parties, there should be no review of constituency boundaries in an election year.”

The above is just the simplified version of the proposal. By the time you get through the full 18 points, you begin to wonder where to start the reform.

Some may argue that the above proposal is the sophisticated approach.  But in a simple society like ours, there is no reason to make things more complex than they really are.

Start with the thought that the over-votes in the 2012 elections were deliberate and humanly manufactured.

We had a vote count that was vastly numerous than biometrically and officially registered.

The need to fix the above flaw, to avoid the potential trouble before the next elections that is only two years away, is urgent.

So what to do?

Start with cleaning up the current voter register while making sure that people only register for the constituency  in which they intend eventually to vote.

Totals on the register for each constituency must be published or displayed  locally and known before the next election to prevent surprises.

After the above, then the no over-vote limitation can be imposed.

Next in line is the testing of the biometric registration system and the training of human operators.

The Electoral Commission must again verify, test, and approve the efficacy of the entire current system. If found wanting, a new system must be commissioned.

Surely, there are proven effective systems somewhere in the world, human and machine, that can efficiently cover the task of registering without flaws our meager population of 24 million people.

India, a country with a population of some 1.2 billion people, was massing up successful biometric identifications for its population just about the same time we were marking ours in 2012.

The BBC reported in February 12, 2013 that “The world's largest biometric identity exercise, which is taking place in India, is well on its way to reaching its target of half the country's population.”

"We are enrolling at the rate of one million a day. We have over 20,000 locations across the country where this is happening…Now we are confident that we have built a system to scale and it's just a question of widening the reach and taking it to every nook and corner," the report quoted Mr. Nandan Nilekani, a former head of Infosys, one of Indian’s biggest IT companies.

The Indian project has not been without controversies and debates. Some even have argued against the propriety of having biometric identity.

There were challenges in the courts against the policy as recent as September 2013 on the grounds that the identification order was not a law passed by the Indian Parliament.

Ghana’s case is different. We have no problem with legality. The essential point here is that we decided and agreed on a biometric registration to keep our elections in Ghana honest.

We have already bought the concept and invested in the technology. What we need now is the superior intervention to make the system work. This is the deficiency any workable proposal must tackle first.

We need to make the biometric identification and recognition system work.  All citizens of voting age must go through the process - if they wish to vote.

The biometric system is already a familiar technology in many countries. There are IT programmers in Ghana and abroad that can supply the expertise. And even if we lack the talent locally, we can still purchase the proficiency from India, or elsewhere. There should be no shame in this simple approach.