The Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) says it will train and deploy 4,000 observers during this year’s general election.

Speaking at the official launch of CODEO’s Election 2012 Project at the GNAT Hall in Accra, Prof. Justice V. C. R. A. C. Crabbe, Co-Chair of CODEO, said the coalition will undertake two major activities on Election Day which are Election Day Observation and Parallel Vote Tabulation.

He said 1,200 of the 4,000 will serve as Rapid Response Observers, who in addition to their regular monitoring duties, will use SMS technology to transmit results from their polling stations to the CODEO Information Center to feed their parallel vote tabulation database.

This year’s intervention, under the theme “Ghana’s Election 2012: Civil Society Intervention Towards Peaceful and Credible Election”, will start with a 9-month pre-election observation programme during which CODEO will deploy 650 field observers to 620 scientifically sampled polling stations across the country to observe the Biometric Registration process.

Another 40 field observers will be deployed to 40 identified violence-prone communities to monitor and report on election violence under their Election Violence and Peace Education Intervention.

Prof. Crabbe stated that the Pre-election Observation Programme will also cover activities such as political parties’ campaigns, voter and civic education and activities by civil society groups.

The launch saw the unveiling of the official song for CODEO’s Ghana Election 2012 Project titled “No War, No Fight” by a group known as Nature.

The project is being funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK Department for International Development.