LOCAL ELECTIONS WORST EVER-EXPERT

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A voting centre
An expert in decentralization and local governance, George Kyei Baffour has observed that even though the conduct of yesterday’s District Level Elections was largely successful, it was fraught with various serious infractions. 

These included the reported violence recorded at some of the voting centres, legal breaches by the Electoral Commission, coupled with inferior quality of some of the election materials used. 

Mr. Kyei Baffour, who is a former President of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana, NALAG, and also a former Presiding Member of the Asante Akyem North District Assembly in Ashanti, made the observations in an interview with GBC’s Garden City Radio in Kumasi. 

He noted that the conduct of yesterday’s District Assembly and Unit Committee elections across the country can pass as the worst in the local government elections in the country, saying that the approach of the EC towards the national exercise is an ample demonstration the low priority that the state attaches to the event.

 He claimed that in certain cases, the Election officials could not even locate their voting centres, while the ballot papers were printed in black and white compared with what pertains in the Presidential and Parliamentary elections.  

 Mr. Kyei Baffuor noted that the fact that the elections were conducted more than the four year constitutional requirement in itself makes the exercise illegal. Additionally, the EC took certain arbitrary decisions that should have been contested in court by the individuals affected. 

One such decision was the disqualification of some of the applicants aged 70 years or above or said to have political affiliations. Such decisions, he noted, were infringements on rights of the nominees in the age limits while the laws regulating the elections mandate only the law courts to convict the accused to serve as the basis for the EC to have disqualified those individuals concerned. 

Mr. Baffuor Kyei noted that such issues bother on serious Constitutional breaches that could have caused the EC in particular, and the country in general serious damages in the conduct of the district level elections.

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