Party Politics and Electoral Malpractice in Ghana’s Election 2012

Ghana is one of the thriving democracies in sub-Saharan Africa. It has held relatively free, fair, and transparent elections and in 2000 and 2008, it passed Samuel Huntington’s (1991) ‘two turn-over test’ of democratic consolidation when peaceful alternation of power occurred. However, last year’s election, the sixth in the series of national and parliamentary elections held since the country was ushered into the Fourth Republic was different from the previous five that came before it. Concerted effort was taken to pursue alleged electoral infractions at the Supreme Court rather than the previous practice of pretending that nothing happened. This paper uses a qualitative research design in which documents critical to the 2012 elections including: the results of the elections, the first written petition of the Election Petitions, the responses from the 1st and 2nd Respondents, the amended petition, the written addresses of all parties to the Election Petition, and the written judgments of all the nine Justices that sat on the case were gathered and analyzed. These documents are manually coded into themes which are subsequently discussed. The paper found that although infractions occurred in last year’s election they were not outcome-determinative. They were purely administrative and in most cases ill-advised decisions by electoral officials that had no impact on the overall results and the winner of the elections. Notwithstanding the above conclusion, the paper proposes some administrative, structural, and legal reforms vis-à-vis the Ghanaian electoral architecture.