Rejected ballots

Budget for rejected (GN)

December 16, 2008
By Doreen Allotey
The National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) is expecting GH¢160,000 from the Ministry of Finance to enable it to carry out more public education to reduce rejected ballots in the December 28 elections.
The amount would be a supplementary budget to GH¢ 622,000 spent by the NCCE for its activities from January to December 7, this year.
For the year’s activities, the NCCE had made a proposal for GH¢830,000 from the Ministry of Finance but it received GH¢622,000 out of the amount.
Figures for the 2004 elections were not readily available.
Mrs Augustina AKosua Akumanyi, Deputy Chairperson of the NCCE, told the Daily Graphic in an interview today that the NCCE made the request for the supplementary budget from the ministry following a request for assistance from the Electoral Commission to assist it to educate the public on rejected ballots.
She said that the NCCE had limited time for the education but would quickly contact its regional offices to link up with presiding officers and political party agents to find out the exact reasons for the phenomenon and the areas where they occurred most.
“ When we get this information, we would mount vigorous education campaigns through the media with messages designed to address the problem and we would use a lot of audio -visuals ”, she said.
Mrs Akumanyi said however that the NCCE would have to know from the EC the definite steps to be adopted for the voting this time round in order to make its education programme successful.
“ We would have to know whether we will be dipping fingers into ink before the voting or after for instance” she added.
On some of the challenges she observed in the December 7 elections, Mrs Akumanyi said it related to the availability of the voter transfer lists at the various polling stations.
She said that the EC had assured this time round that the lists would be made available at the various polling stations.
She hoped that the EC would also provide lanterns at the various polling stations to facilitate the counting of votes saying that at some places , they had to resort to the head lamps of vehicles to see.
Mrs Akumanyi appealed to Government officials not to interfere with work at the polling stations adding that they are not part of the administration of elections.
In the December 7 elections, there were 205,438 rejected ballots out of the 8,671,272 votes cast . This represented 2.4 per cent of the total votes cast. There were 12,472,758 registered voters.