Election 2008

Last Sunday Dec. 7th, Ghana held its 6th free democratic election in their 51 year history as an independent country. Similar to our November election, the party in power had served the two term limit so a new President was certain. There were actually 8 people running but it was generally agreed that the race was between two candidates with a third party candidate possibly making a difference. The rule is that the candidate must have ‘50% plus one’ in order to win.

Now before I go any farther, remember this is me, Leslie, describing what I saw. I’m not a political scientist -not even very politically saavy, I’m just commenting on what I experienced and heard. The main thing that has struck me all fall about these elections was the focus on peaceful/non corrupt elections. Several African countries have had recent elections marred by violence and corruption. Ghana was determined NOT to let this happen. There were more ads about peaceful elections and avoiding corruption than there were about the candidates platforms! My favorite ad recently has been: ‘Vote on Dec. 7th, vote peacefully and vote only once’. Numerous times the election process in the US was brought up as a model for the country. Ghanaians seem to be especially taken with McCain’s concession speech and it is brought up all the time as the proper way to react to defeat.

The voting process in Ghana has improved during each election but problems such as dual registration, registration of minors, inaccessibility of polling places, and lack of education of voters on how to vote, were expected. My Fulbright friend Rebecca came to Tema from Accra and stayed with me to watch the voting process with me since my school was one of the 240 polling places in the country.

Polls opened at 7:30 AM and on the news I heard that in some places in Accra voters were lined up at 3AM. Long waits were feared and people wanted to make sure they could get to church (although many churches changed their services to Saturday evening). The country had minimal issues of disruption and there is a lot of country pride about this. Here is the sight at my school at 8AM-you could have heard a pin drop.

Voting booth (cardboard box)


The ballot showed pictures of the candidates and then their party symbol-no written words. You placed your thumb in ink and voted with a thumbprint. The ballot was folded and placed in the Tupperware tub.


At 5PM (remember sun goes down at 6) the votes were counted. Anyone who wanted to watch was allowed to.


The votes were dumped on a table separated.


Then the main official (they wore turquoise jackets) one by one held up the ballots and said “one, two, three…”

Countrywide, the votes took 3 days to count. Results were called in but then the actual ballots had to be driven to the central location-some towns in Ghana are very remote and roads are not good. All TV stations for 3 days showed nothing but results-which trickled in. It was tedious to say the least, but I kept watching. The statistician in me was amused by the faulty pie charts and bar graphs shown to indicate results.
(Historical data can't be represented on a on a pie chart and this doesn’t even add to 100 anyway!)

So-who’s the new President? Well many of you have e-mailed me and know. There isn’t one! The top vote getter, the incumbent party candidate had 49.1% and the opposing party had 47.9%. The 50%+1 was not met so …RUN OFF. The entire process will be repeated on Sunday Dec. 28th. The focus is on decreasing the large number (300,000) of rejected ballots (voting with the wrong finger, image doubled when folded, etc etc) and all are curious to see if more people will vote (about 8 million did) and who the 2% who voted for other candidates will vote for. The new President is supposed to take over Jan 7th…so we’re cutting it close!

I’m going to write one more blog next Monday on a few fun end-of term activities that have been going on. Then I’ll take a month break!

PS. I bought this prickly thing today. The girl told me it was a ‘sweet apple’. Well it obviously wasn’t an apple (they call an avocado a pear so who knows…) and it wasn’t particularly sweet (more citrus-y). Hmmm hope I was supposed to EAT it!