The African Electoral Institute (AEI) has admonished the Electoral Commission (EC) to allow political parties to observe the processes of transferring votes for the 2024 general elections.
The AEI’s admonition comes after the EC announced in a statement on Monday, 3 June 2024, that political parties would no longer be allowed to observe the transfer of votes exercise.
“The AEI is by this press release admonishing the EC to allow the political parties to observe this exercise to nib in the bud any iota of suspicion and to underscore the EC’S motto of TRANSPARENCY. The AEI wishes to remind the EC that election is a process, and the transfer exercise is part of the process.
“Therefore, a mere observation of the votes transfer by political parties will go a long way to augment the transparency credentials of the EC and the acceptance of election results in good faith,” the AEI said in a statement issued Monday by its Communications and External Relations Directorate.
Background of AEI
The AEI is a civil society organisation (CSO) founded in 2001 to deliver sustainable electoral solutions to emerging and developed democracies in Africa.
Headquartered in Ghana, the organisation aims to strengthen, augment, and build electoral stakeholders capacity and participation on electoral issues through electoral education on voter’s rights and freedom, electoral research, election monitoring, election observation, election results collation, election security awareness and training of polling agents and elections directors.
Its position has been to uphold the fact that “elections are won at the polling stations’’ and that equitable participation of all identifiable electoral stakeholders in an electoral process— such as political parties and government institutions among others— do not only strengthen transparency and accountability for free, fair and credible elections but also would help to bring about stable democracies in Africa and the world at large.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
