This op-ed has been sent to Malik, Elvis and my numerous media collaborators via electronic mail (Email). If you are now reading it, it is because they in turn have generously agreed that what I have to say is worth sharing with their readers, and have shared it on their platforms via another form of e- transmission; websites, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Instagram, etc., Whatever the medium of e-transmission is, the common denominator is that you my cherished readers are reading exactly the words I have penned on my laptop word for word.

The essence of e-transmission is simple. It is to deliver a specific message from a remote originating source to a specified destination. It is to deliver this message in its original form to its intended target in the same form as a whole, intact and unaltered. To ensure the document is not tampered with during transmission, various forms of protections, encryptions, are deployed to ensure that what is sent is exactly what is received. In our everyday lives, we use and implicitly trust various e-transmission formats such as whatsupp, snapchat, oih, text messages, Gmail, outlook etc., etc., to send and receive mails and related communication, both general and highly confidential, in the belief that no one else has breached the confidentiality between us, i.e. me and the other communicants.

You may ask why I have gone through all of the above elaboration? It is simply an attempt to demystify e-transmission as some new tool that will ensure that the forthcoming elections will be the cleanest in Ghana’s 4^th Republic. The reality is that no matter the new and fancied form of e-transmission, the basic lesson we learned nearly 30 years ago, “Garbage in, Garbage out’, is as applicable today as it was when we first started electronic media at least half a century ago.  All of the elections we have held from 1992 to 2012, have relied on e-transmission to get the results declared at constituency centres to the regional and national collation centres, to ensure the speediest possible declaration of the outcome. To date, that e-transmission medium has been the Facsimile (fax) machine.  It has served us well and reliably over the years, and even as the losers have sometimes grumbled, there has been a general acceptance of the e-transmitted results to the so called “strong room “at the EC headquarters in Accra as the basis of declaring winners and losers.

So if indeed we are doing nothing extraordinary in proposing e-transmission for this year’s elections, why is there so much rancour and bitterness between the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) and some of the political parties, especially the New Patriotic Party (NPP) about using a supposedly better and faster form of e-transmission? As always, the devil is in the details. There is a huge disconnect between how the EC is implementing the bigger, better and enormously expensive improved e-transmission, and how the political parties understood that it would be rolled out. The EC argues that its mode of implementation will ensure greater transparency. On the other hand, the political parties believe the EC’s approach is a drastic departure from the established and agreed format for declaring electoral outcomes and also increases the opportunity to confuse the long established processes.

It is essential for all of our sakes to sift the wheat from the chaff in this current chasm between the EC as the referee, and the political parties, as the players. It is my considered opinion that the EC must put an immediate stop to the ongoing exercise of public demonstration by potential e-transmission vendors until there is a consensus on how the results of the polls will be collated and put together, before proceeding to select a vendor to facilitate the process. For in the end, we all need to understand that the purpose of e-transmission is to facilitate the delivery of the agreed processes, and not to change it completely. The EC may be right in telling me that they are an independent entity, and that they can vary agreed advice as it deems appropriate. That would be correct but extremely unwise position to adduce, let alone proceed with.  The current exercise may demonstrate that the selection process is transparent. However, it will not pass the test as to whether it satisfies the solution that was seemingly agreed.

Following the contested outcome of the 2012 election, the EC, acting on the advice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SC), established an Electoral Reform Committee (ERM) to do things better for future elections. Amongst its key recommendations were those contained in paragraph 34 of the ERC report, which recommended to “set up a national collation Centre to replace the “strong room”

To promote transparency and openness, the ERC proposed as follows: 1) the national Centre should be equipped with electronic screen that will openly display election results as these results are received from the constituencies; and 2) It is further recommended that hand-held scanners should be used to scan constituency collated forms that contain the polling station results and sent electronically and directly to the National Collation Centre. The hard copies would be sent physically to the Head office of the EC”. The recommendations of the ERC were subsequently presented to and adopted by the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC). This proposal was consistent with already established procedures for results declaration which ensures that results are first collated and declared at the constituency level before subsequent transmission to the national focal point.

So the question is: “When and Why did the EC decide to depart from the consensus approach in implementation and go for scanning and e-transmitting results from all of the 29.000 polling stations, directly to the national collation Centre? The change is likely to be both unnecessarily expensive and a veritable waste of precious public resources; as well as likely to take away the control of results declaration from the constituency level. And quite frankly, given the current e-infrastructure coverage throughout Ghana, almost impossible to achieve in many of the more remote constituencies, let alone polling stations. My attempt to elicit a cogent and rational reason for the EC has not been successful so far. But to my simple mind, the principle of “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it” is eminently still applicable. We have established a trusted way of delivering election results that we all have confidence in. The e-transmission proposal should simply make this process faster so we can declare the outcome of elections in say 24 hours instead of 3 days. This has to be the limited objective for Election 2016. If e-transmission turns out to be a hazy medium that would confuse and obfuscate the declaration of the outcome of the election, we should jettison it now and put the money saved to better use to further improve the integrity of our elections.