Spoilt ballots affect democratic choice — Lecturer
A senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Legon, Dr Ransford Gyampoh, has stated that large number of spoilt ballots clearly affect the democratic choice of who becomes President or Member of Parliament.
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Dr Gyampoh, who is also a Research Fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), told the Daily Graphic that the fact that elections had been won in the country by very narrow margins since 2008 should be a matter of concern for Ghanaians as they considered ways to fine-tune the electoral process.
Background
Dr Gyampoh said in 1992, rejected ballots accounted for 3.6 per cent of the valid votes cast and reduced to 1.5 per cent in 1996, but in the first round of the 2000 general election, it accounted for 1.8 per cent of the valid vote counts and reduced to 1.58 per cent during the presidential run-off.
The senior lecturer continued that the figures soared in 2004 and constituted 2.2 per cent of the votes cast while in 2008 they took 2.4 per cent of the valid votes cast.
Dr Gyampoh said although the country was getting matured democratically, it was clear that individuals were getting confused with the voting process. The number of rejected ballots recorded in the first round of the 2008 presidential race was unprecedentedly higher than ever, both in terms of percentages and in terms of absolute figures.
According to the Electoral Commission of Ghana, as many as 205,438 ballots were rejected in the 2008 elections, which constituted 2.4 per cent of the total of 8,671,272 votes cast and that hypothetically, the “rejected ballot party” placed third in the 2008 presidential race.
According to him, if rejected ballots were a political party, they could boast of a steady increase in popularity ahead of the smaller parties since the country’s return to multiparty democracy in 1992.
He said in the 2012 general election, 251,720 rejected votes (2.3 per cent), were higher than the total votes secured by all the other presidential candidates, excluding those of the NDC and the NPP.
In the recently run NPP presidential primary, as many as 1,277 ballots were rejected, which was more than what Mr Francis Addai-Nimoh, who placed third, garnered. His 1,128 votes represented 0.91 per cent of the total votes.
Conspiracy theory
He said there was a conspiracy theory that most of the rejected ballots were a creation of “malevolent election officials” who manipulate some of the ballots.
According to the claim, the malevolent election officials manage to find their way to the strongholds of their opposing candidates and during the issuing out of ballot papers to voters or setting out of the ballots for counting after the poll, apply extra thumbprints to a number of ballot papers to invalidate them, thereby reducing the votes of their opponents.
Democracy consolidation
Dr Gyampoh said the IEA believed that at the very minimum, democracy consolidation required free, fair, peaceful and transparent elections that allowed the citizens to choose their leaders.
He, however, noted that the high incidence of rejected ballots that had characterised the country’s elections posed a severe threat to the minimum requirement for democratic consolidation.
Electoral Commission
The Daily Graphic on Tuesday made strenous attempts to get the EC to comment on the issue but it proved futile. A lady at the Public Relations outfit directed this reporter to the office of the Director of Pubilc Relations but it was locked. The EC Chairman and his deputies were also not around to comment on the matter.