The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) says it has increased its educational efforts, especially for first-time voters as the December 7 polls draw near.
According to the Commission, their educational efforts have been decentralized to the district levels as they attempt to maximize their already scarce resources and cover enough grounds before the 2020 general elections.
“The voter education is still going on. We are now re-educating and educating both continuous and first-time voters on the right way to cast a vote and how to properly fold the ballot paper. This is being done to prevent voters from rendering their ballots invalid”.
The Deputy Chairperson of the NCCE, Kathleen Addy made this comment in an interview with Samuel Eshun, host of the Happy Morning Show aired on e.TV Ghana and Happy 98.9 FM.
She motioned that her outfit distributes resource materials from the head office to the various district offices for onward dissemination of information amongst the citizenry. “What we do is give out the programme outline to our district officers who educate the people via dawn broadcast, community radio and stakeholder engagement”.
When asked if the Commission had enough officers to undertake their educational campaign, the Deputy Commissioner answered in the negative. “If we have more people to help with our work, our efforts would’ve been felt much more. But currently, we have our officers in all districts across the country. We have not dispatched anyone from the head office”, she clarified.
Regardless of Ghana being highly respected when it comes to democracy, rejected ballots during the elections remains a challenge.
Many have asserted that without adequate education, going into the December 7 elections, the situation may repeat itself.
Ballots Rejected
In all the seven general elections, the country has had – 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 – the rising incidence of rejected ballots triggered concerns among the electorate, particularly political pundits.
Since Ghana’s return to multiparty democracy in 1992, rejected ballots have been seen in every election.
Some 149,813 rejected ballots were recorded in 1992, there were 111,108 in 1996 and 119,372 in 2000, before the figure surged to 188,123 in 2004.
In the 2008 general election, in particular, rejected ballots shot up to 205,843, with the figure going up again to 243,280 in 2012, before reducing marginally to 167,349 in 2016.
After summing the rejected ballots in 2008, these ballots placed third in the presidential race, ahead of Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), who placed third with 113,494 votes, constituting 1.34 per cent of the total ballots cast, behind Professor John Evans Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who placed second with 4,05,634, constituting 47.9 per cent of the votes and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), who garnered 49.13 per cent.
By: Joel Sanco
