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He was just 35 years old.
He had been part of an angry, youthful group of National Democratic Congrress (NDC) supporters, then in opposition, who stormed the EC’s district office in a rather violent attempt to stop what they believed were attempts to steal the elections for the governing party at the time, the New Patriotic Party (NPP). In the attack, they smashed ballot boxes, crashed laptop computers, and set the building on fire. Police responded with gunfire. A bullet hit Ziblim and he died shortly thereafter in hospital.
Two hundred and twenty kilometres away in Mankranso in the Ashanti Region, the same suspicion that enraged the NDC youth in Damongo filled the air. NDC and NPP supporters clashed at the constituency collation centre, accusing each other of attempting to rig the elections. Amid the chaos, gunshots were fired. Akwasi Nimo, 33, was hit and later pronounced dead.
All around the country, in the agonising wait for official election results, tension was rising as the NDC, for the most part, published results that pointed to a landslide electoral victory. Those results were based on what party officials described as their internal collation of results from polling stations and constituencies nationwide. The longer it took the Electoral Commission to confirm those results, the more suspicious NDC supporters grew, with many of them thronging various offices of the Commission to register their anger at the delay in the release of official results, which they expected to confirm those released by their party.
The tension was palpable. Almost every Ghanaian with a little political awareness could feel it. Those who went to bed on election night, hoped for results from the EC by daybreak. When they woke up, the EC had done very little, but the then Vice President and Presidential Candidate of the NPP, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, delivered to the nation, a gift – a concession speech that released the tensions and anxieties.
Somehow, that concession also caused many to forget about what some have described as the EC’s ineptitude in whatever was keeping them from releasing the election results. Under the circumstances, the EC released the full presidential election results on the Monday evening after the polls closed – that was more than 48 hours after the elections and at least 43 hours behind the collation machine of the NDC and the NPP, which informed Dr Bawumia’s decision to concede.
Parallel Collation Systems: Parties Ahead of the Commission
With the dust settled on the 2024 elections, many political analysts can’t help but wonder why the EC, with its vast resources and funding, keeps playing catch-up in the important task of election results collation and declaration, always lagging behind the two main political parties with limited resources.
Over the past three election cycles, Ghana’s major political parties have built internal systems to independently collate election results. These mechanisms allow parties to predict outcomes within hours of polls closing, well before the EC releases official results.
Enoch Afoakwah of the NPP’s Communications and Legal Team, claims the party had confirmed the presidential outcome within three hours. Dzifa Gunu, NDC’s La Dadekotopon Election Director and now CEO of the Accra Digital Centre, says his party’s collation system had provided clear projections on election night.
“As at 8 pm to 9 pm, on election day, we had a very fair, strong percentage of the results in, and we knew we had clearly won the election,” Mr Gunu told the Fourth Estate.
He says the party’s collation platform was “a very soft, well-designed and easy to use system” anchored on a rigorously designed collation system.
Using already existing party structures, the NDC recruited and trained experienced polling station agents to transmit the certified election results to a designated platform within the constituency and then to the party’s national collation centre. The platform, Mr Gunu says, was designed to operate with and without an internet connection.
In 2016, the NPP had established similar procedures. The party’s agents were tasked to send pictures of the Statement of Poll and Declaration of Results Sheet [pink sheet] to a designated party constituency collation centre. The party officials at the centre keyed the results onto computers and sent them to the national collation centre. As the NPP emphatically projected its victory eight hours after the 2016 election, the NDC was cocksure of capturing power a few hours after the polls in December 2024. In both instances, the two parties used their internal collation systems.
In contrast, the EC remains bound to a highly manual and, some say, archaic process. Presiding officers at polling stations must physically transport pink sheets to constituency collation centres. From there, the results are sent to the Regional Collation Centres and collated in the full view of the party agents. It is from there that the results are sent to the National Collation Centre via fax, a 160-year-old technology which has been rendered largely obsolete by modern information technology.
An officer of the Commission who spoke to The Fourth Estate on condition of anonymity insisted that fax machines are still being used because they are a more secure platform and as long as they remain the EC’s preferred means of result transmission, the political parties would always be ahead of the EC in collating election results.
“When the last officer hasn’t arrived, I can’t declare results,” said the EC official. “But by that time, the parties would already have their results for the constituency.”
Five months before the 2024 general election, the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) had proposed that the EC set up a website to host transmitted certified election results directly from the polling stations to increase transparency and reduce the tension that arises as a result of the delay in announcing results. It is hard to tell if the Commission took the recommendation seriously.
It however, employed regional collation officers for the sixteen regions to work on the collation of all the constituency results in each region before the results were sent to the national collation centre.
Bureaucracy, Bottlenecks, and Bloodshed
Unlike previous elections where regional EC directors cross-checked and sent constituency results to the national collation centre immediately after they had certified them, the EC decided that in the 2024 elections, it would collate all constituency results in a region before onward transmission to the national collation centre. While intended to ease pressure at the national office, critics argue this move created unnecessary friction.
What the EC considered as an innovation, “offered no practical benefit,” says Kofi Bentil, Senior Vice President of IMANI Africa. “It only added confusion.”
Oliver Barker-Vormawor, a lawyer and activist, agrees: “It didn’t make sense. It delayed results and heightened suspicions.”
Joseph Oti Frimpong, lead coordinator for the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) in the last elections, condemned the new process for fuelling tensions and delaying transparency. “People feared results were being tampered with,” he says.
While The Fourth Estate’s anonymous source at the EC defended the new layer because it reduced pressure on the national collation centre, s/he conceded the collation “could have been done without” the regional collation officers as “they were not needed.”
A Technological Paradox
Despite receiving GHS786.9 million in funding for the 2024 elections, the Electoral Commission maintained its outdated approach to result collation. Critics question the EC’s reliance on decades-old technologies like fax machines, which many institutions have abandoned.
“They buy expensive printers, only to use the fax function,” says Mr Bentil. “It’s institutional arrogance. The EC has more resources than any party, yet performs worse. The EC does not have a monopoly on determining what is the best technology for collating results because others have been able to collate results better than the EC. But they insist that they would do it their way.”
He added that the EC’s inability to match a single political party’s performance in collating results is indefensible.
The anonymous EC source admitted: “there’s nothing special about what the parties are doing that we can’t do. We just wait for the physical pink sheets. That’s the difference.”
Even simple digital solutions could accelerate the process, s/he added.
A Trust Deficit
Beyond infrastructure, the real crisis is one of trust. Mistrust between political actors and the EC fuels tension, chaos, and sometimes, bloodshed.
On the insistence of party leaders, NDC and NPP supporters swarmed collation centres to prevent alleged rigging attempts.
The NPP’s Mr Afoakwah says it would be a “real challenge if the EC intends to go digital” because the political parties and the citizens don’t believe the EC is impartial. He believes any electronic system would only be complementary to what the EC has in place currently.
The NDC’s Gzifa Gunu echoes this scepticism, citing “very credible reasons” for the party’s lack of faith in the EC, which underscored the need for a parallel collation system.
Mr Barker-Vormawor says there is usually tension at the collation centres, especially at the collation of parliamentary results, because each candidate is trying to put the “other in the position of being the one who will go to court in trying to overturn the election.”
He argues that this posturing by the parties persists because while the counting of the ballots is done for voters to see, collation is limited to a few individuals.
“People’s anxieties are not [entirely] settled after elections have been declared at the polling station,” he says. “They are concerned that en route to the collation centre, something can happen.”
Way Forward
Mr Bentil says that if the EC “would be less arrogant” and use the technical infrastructure already existing in the country, it could transmit election results from polling stations into a secure national database seamlessly.
“We have built a cell phone network, which is 4G broadband. We actually have other networks of a national scale which is capable of doing it. Today, as I speak, Starlink is present in this country. So, even using a mobile phone system alone, it is possible.”
To curb suspicions of manipulation and ensure full transparency in the collation process, CODEO’s Mr Frimpong urges the EC to send presidential results directly from polling stations to the national collation centre in real time, as it is done in Kenya and Nigeria.
A technology company in Accra, Wigal, says it has developed a software application, iCollate, to assist in collating election results.
The CEO of Wigal, Stephen Agyei-Kyei, told The Fourth Estate that the chaos, tension and deaths that characterised the collation process could have “easily” been prevented if the EC had adopted digital transmission right from the polling stations.
“The main idea is that as people are entering their results from various polling stations, the system is collating. The collation is automated,” Agyei-Kyei says. “So, at the end of the day, people get to see a picture of what is [unfolding]. That is what the political parties do anyway. This is for the Ghanaian to also do that.”
Mr Barker-Vormawor acknowledges that digital transmission of election results could resolve collation issues. But he warns against the use of an “elite solution”, which is how he sees digital platforms.
“The question,” he argues, “is whether the vast majority of our people, who are uneducated, trust in an electronic system.”
Mr. Barker-Vormawor insists that the first step is for the EC to pay attention to its website, which had barely any election results in the last election cycle.
“Let me just take the EC’s website. Technology must start from there,” he says. “The website must be interactive enough. The EC has so much money, but they can’t put together a team to handle such a website. I don’t understand.”
