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Special voting fixed on December 1

This was announced by the Chairperson of the commission at an Inter Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting on Friday, October 28 in Accra.

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Special voting, also called early voting, is an arrangement instituted to get the security personnel who will be on duty on Election Day to vote.

This was announced by the Chairperson of the commission at an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting on Friday, October 28 in Accra.

She also announced that 15 million voters will cast their votes in 28,992 polling stations across the country.Meanwhile, the commission has been dragged to court over the rules governing special voting by Dr Kwame Amoako Tuffuor, a retired lecturer; Benjamin Arthur, an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Practitioner, and Adreba Abrefa Damoa, a pensioner.

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They argue that Constitutional Instrument (C.I.) 94, which states that special voting ballot boxes will be sealed to be opened on the close of poll on election day for counting were unconstitutional.

“To brazenly let any provision of C.I. 94 regarding special voting override Article 49 of the 1992 Constitution and Section 13 of PNDCL 284 in the name of an unprovable fear of victimisation of special voters is to assert that in spite of the strides made in over 20 years of constitutionalism, we still creep at the repercussions of our legitimate democratic choices. Security officers vote for and against governments or opposition parties during elections. No fetish should be made about this fact,” the statement of case accompanying the writ seeking to invoke the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court has said.

They are therefore praying the court that upon a true and proper interpretation of Article 49 of the 1992 Constitution, ‘special voting’ as provided for by Regulation 23 of the Public Elections Regulations, 2016; CI.94 is a part of public elections.

They want the results of the special voters counted and declared instead of waiting until December 7 to count it together with the 'general' voters.

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