2016 polls will be Ghana's best - Charlotte Osei

With all the electoral reforms put in place for the December 7 presidential and parliamentary elections, Ghana will experience one of the best polls whose results will be accepted by all, Mrs Charlotte Osei, the Chair of the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana, has said.

During a signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Understanding with a delegation from the European Union (EU) in Accra on Tuesday October 18, Mrs Osei said: “We welcome the work of the observer team and indeed we have had previous engagements in the past few months with the pre-assessment team that came earlier. We believe that this team, like the previous one, will help us in improving the quality of our elections and strengthen the integrity of our system. We will also be welcoming an observer team from the United States of America, Canada, EFID, the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Development in Africa, the African Union, and the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) team.”

“We are very much looking forward to working with the teams and the very many applications we have received from domestic observer teams as well. For the domestic observer team, the Commission will still be coming out with guidelines for accreditation for that process and also a manual to guide the work of the domestic observer team.

“So, I am very happy that the EU has taken the step to sign a Memorandum of Understanding agreement with us, formally recognising the rights and obligations of both parties and we thank you for the support you have given to the elections so far, and which you continue to give to Ghana as a whole, and we look forward to working with you and with the team. We are very certain that the work of the observer mission will strengthen the integrity and the outcome and the acceptability of this year’s elections.

“With all the reforms that we have rolled out this year, we are certain as a commission that Ghana is going to have one of the best elections ever with higher levels of transparency, inclusiveness, and credibility and so we thank you and we look forward to working with you.”