Accra, Ghana//-As Ghana goes to polls in December 2024, the Program Manager at the Democracy and Civic Engagement Unit of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, Ms Bonolo Makgale has urged the Electoral Commission (EC) to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to dispel disinformation before, during and after the general elections.
According to her, rising disinformation and its cousins namely misinformation and fake news in Ghana and across Africa’s electoral processes, if not could mar the beauty of elections in the region thereby undermining democracy in Africa.
Disinformation which is described as false or misleading information that is spread deliberately to deceive someone, individuals, or groups, is a subset of misinformation.
So, misinformation is false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead, while fake news is purposefully crafted, sensational, emotionally charged, misleading or fabricated information that mimics the form of mainstream news.
Ms Makgale made the call at a roundtable discussion on electoral reforms organised by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana). The event also served as a lessons and experience-sharing session on electoral reforms.
She said the Ghanaian EC could also deploy AI and other technology tools to counter disinformation and fake news as was done by the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). The IEC deployed AI robots to fight the canker of disinformation and fake news. They were also used for voter education, among others.
As Ghana inches closer to the 2024 general elections, the organiser aims to pick some lessons from South Africa’s elections held in June 2024.
Sharing lessons and experiences from the recent South African general elections, she said for the first time since 1994, South Africa had the lowest voter turnout in the June 2024 elections which was attributed to voter apathy, “the youth didn’t see the need to go out to vote”, and low interest in democracy among others.
“We had a higher percentage of women voting in South Africa, but we had arguably a very low representation of women. There were various issues including the candidate selection process, how parties prioritize the representation of women, and challenges of resources”, she said.
She therefore called on the various political parties in Ghana to prioritise the representation of women in politics. This is because people trust women more than men. However, a lot of women who participate in elections do not have the resources to run effective and efficient campaigns as compared to their male counterparts.
“So, we need to also think about resource mobilisations for female candidates”, Ms Makgale stated.
Although there were long queues across South Africa, but it did not translate to higher voter turns due to the mismanagement.
She said the recent South Africa election recorded 70 political parties whilst 52 candidates were on the ballot box.
On voter education, Ms Makgale noted the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) did very well by using multi-platforms to conduct voter education across the length and breadth of South Africa. For instance, the IEC used community radio stations, televisions, and regional and national radio stations to urge people to go out and vote.
“One important thing that the IEC did which was exceptional was its collaboration with the civil society organisations. This enabled most civil society actors in the country to support the work of the IEC thereby leading to enhanced voter education”.
Gaps
Speaking on some of the reforms being championed by the CDD-Ghana’s Electoral Reforms Project to be implemented by the EC, Parliament, and the government, the Programs Officer of CDD-Ghana, Joseph Oti Frimpong noted that there have been some improvements in Ghana’s electoral processes despite the improvements there are still more to do within the electoral system.
He grouped them into three and mentioned results management and announcement as the first group.
He indicated: “When it comes to results management and announcement, there is a resurfacing of errors at the polling stations on the polling station results sheets.
Whenever there are mistakes in Ghana currently, we don’t have a standardised way of correcting these mistakes, so polling station officials and EC officials use their discretion. So, this still is a gap when it comes to results management and announcement that we are facing as a country”.
Still under results management and announcement, the EC after the counting and announcement, upload the results from the constituency level and the regional level on their website. But not results from the polling station, so that is still a gap within the electoral processes in Ghana, Mr Frimpong added.
Another gap he mentioned is election adjudication. After the 2012 election adjudication, there was a presidential petition that took Ghana about eight months to solve that issue. So, the judiciary service decided to reduce the timeline. They did that for the presidential level but not the parliamentary level one.
So, currently, we don’t have a definite timeline for adjudicating parliamentary petitions so there have been several cases that have been at the court of law after the 2020 elections, he said.
Adding that after the 2020 elections, there were about 17 cases that went to the courts, and out of the 17, few of them had been resolved, and none of them took less than a year to resolve those cases. So, that is another gap within the electoral system in Ghana.
The third one he cited is the Affirmative Action Bill. “So, looking at these three gaps within the electoral system, we are seeking to implement four objects”.
Objectives and Demands
“First, we want the Election Commission to give us a standardised way of correcting errors on the results sheets, and the second thing is that we want the Election Commission to also publish the results of the polling station on their website instead of focusing on the constituency and the regional levels, and the third one is that we are seeking a definite timeline for adjudicating parliamentary disputes, and the fourth is, we want the passage of the Affirmative Action Bill into law.
So, these are the four objectives of the Electoral Reforms Project of CDD-Ghana, we started this project in January last year and it is expected to end in July next year.
So, we have engaged major stakeholders within the country, and when it comes to the parliamentary election petition, we have engaged the Chief Justice on that, and we also engaged the Judiciary Review Committee. We want them to amend the PNDC Law 248, which will ensure a shorter timeline so that they have to change the rules of the courts to help us get a shorter timeline.
When it comes to the results management, he said they have had several discussions with the Electoral Commission, and we somehow got a positive response from the Electoral Commission.
On the Affirmative Action Bill, he said they met the Deputy Minister for Gender and Social Protection, and they also met the former Majority Leader, Osei Kye-Mensah-Bonsu, they met the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin and they had several discussions on the Affirmative Action Bill.
He was quick to add that they also set up some structures to engage the stakeholders implementing these projects.
These he mentioned include the conduction of a study on the parliamentary election adjudication cases, where they spoke to several lawyers and discussed how nothing could be done and how they were frustrated by the current system of not having a definite timeline for parliamentary election adjudication.
Apart from the research, he said they intended to support the work of the Judiciary Review Committee on their analysis or their meetings on the setting up timeline election adjudication basis.
“We also seek to have some further engagements with the Electoral Commission on that. So, these are things that we are working on regarding the Electoral Reforms Project”, Mr Frimpong stated.
Deployment of the military
On the deployment of the military in the 2020 elections, the Director of Programmes and Policy Engagement of CDD-Ghana, Dr Kojo Asante said the main issue that came out after the election was how to deploy the military in the context of election security.
According to him, in the post-election period, CDD-Ghana’s Election Governance team was following up on cases of the eight people who died during the 2020 elections and they were commitments from the IGP that they (police) were going to give Ghanaians periodic updates on those case, but that never happened.
“The danger with these issues when they are not resolved, is that then they become a rallying point for retaliation and violence and so on. So, it is just unfortunate that we had almost four years of trying to get accountability and justice, but somehow, we managed not to do it”, Dr Asante said.
He continued: “One the thing that also comes of this, is the accountability around the military. When they engage in these kinds of human rights violations and others, what really should be the response, it looks like the Executive is completely incapable of holding the army to account at all.
And the army itself has not been proactive in really coming to say, we have taken them through a court martial or something we come up with to punish the soldiers who allegedly killed the eight citizens during the 2020 elections.
Historically, we have had a challenge with the military. Security governance is one of the things that we need to look at. Because we are going continue to use the army to deal with internal security, then these matters are going to keep coming, according to him.
The participants at the roundtable also discussed campaign financing where politicians are currently spending a lot on their campaign activities to the chagrin of many.
