A former Chair of the Electoral Commission (EC) Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan has said that Ghana copied the wrong style of collating election results from Nigeria.
He said creating more collation centres is a wrong approach to gathering election results after indicating that more collation centres create the grounds for rigging.
Dr Afari-Gyan made a case for the reduction in the number of collation centers in Ghana while speaking at a forum to mark 60 years of the political science department of the University of Ghana.
This, in his view, would reduce the rate of voter manipulation.
He said “Examples from recent elections will indicate that collation centres are the most vulnerable points in manipulating election results. It is not desirable to set up any collation point in the results management process.”
Throwing more light on what he said in an interview with TV3’s Eric Mawuena Egbeta on the sidelines of the event, Dr Afari-Gyan said “I was saying that I was happy that Mr Mac Manu was thinking about directly sending election results from the polling station to the central point, i.e the Electoral Commission.
“When I went to Nigeria I was told that Ghana had borrowed something from Nigeria and I said what is it? They said it has to do with collation, establishing additional collation points.
“Instantly, I said if that is what we have borrowed then it is retrogressive borrowing, it is not something that takes us forward, it is something that takes us backward and I was explaining that even Nigeria itself with the huge number of polling stations, in the last elections started trying to send election results directly to the electoral commission or to a central point where even ordinary voters could view what election results were coming from.”