Three Decades of Electoral Reforms Under Ghana’s Fourth Republic: Improving the Quality of Elections from 1992 – 2022

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain Ghana’s success story regarding the quality of her general elections from the perspective of electoral reforms put in place by the stakeholders that matter. From a flawed start in November 1992 presidential elections which led to the opposition boycotting the December parliamentary elections the same year, Ghana now prides itself in seven (7) successful, peaceful, free, fair and transparent elections. Relying heavily on published materials and elites interviews from officials of the Electoral Commission (EC), top party executives from the two main political parties in Ghana: the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), this paper argues that though Ghana started very badly in 1992, she has been able to improve tremendously upon the quality of subsequent elections in general, but in particular, the organisation of each election is always an improvement upon the previous one. All these became possible due to numerous electoral reforms, such as the transformation of the Interim Nation Electoral Commission (INEC) into a permanent and independent EC, replacing thumb-printed voter ID cards with photo IDs, the replacement of opaque ballot boxes with transparent ones, the introduction of Biometric Verification Machines, the creation of sixteen (16) regional collation centres to replace the two hundred and seventy-five (275) and many others. The paper concludes that, though Ghana has done so well regarding elections, especially compared with her neighbours within the ECOWAS sub-region, she cannot claim to have arrived because sporadic electoral violence, abuse of incumbency, and vote buying persist. Their presence does not only threaten the electoral process but also disempower the individual citizens who are the principal actors in the democratic process for whom these elections are conducted.