Editorial: Is 2,340 Delegates more equitable than 115,000?

The New Patriotic Party goes to conference this Saturday to vote on a series of constitutional amendments, including the expansion of the electoral colleges to nominate party officers, parliamentary and presidential candidates. The anti-expansionists are rallying around the flag of fairness and arguing that the proposed expansion is not equitable.

The proposed amendment extends the franchise for the nomination of a presidential candidate to all the 105,170 NPP polling station officers across the country. This translates into 5 delegates per polling station, on top of some 7,800 others.

The point of the anti-expansionists is that there are some big constituencies in densely populated areas that have less polling stations than some smaller constituencies in areas like Upper East Region, which are sparsely populated but polling stations are created more for geographical considerations than population density.

Their argument is not flawed but rather conveniently selective This is a fundamental situation which has been created by the political boundaries carved by the Electoral Commission. Their issue is misdirected to the party. After all, under the current electoral college, 10 delegates are selected from each constituency to add up to 2,300 constituency delegates for the presidential nominations. That is not seen as unfair by the anti-expansionists.

But can it be sufficiently argued that allowing 2340 members of a group to choose its leader fairer than having 115,000 members of the same group to make that choice?

Chiana-Paga in the Upper West has 108 polling stations and a quarter of the voter population in Subin in Kumasi which has 97 polling stations. But, those are isolated cases and certainly not the norm. For example, Ashanti with 17% of the national population and 39 constituencies has 3,665 (17%) polling stations and Greater Accra with 16% of the population has 27 constituencies and 2456 (12%) polling stations. It can be said that Ashanti Region has an ‘unfairly’ higher number of polling stations and constituencies than the capital. But, the nation finds it acceptable for good reasons, too.

On the other hand, Upper East has 5% of the population, with 13 constituencies and 1028 (5%) polling stations. Upper West has 3% of the nation’s people with 10 constituencies and 854 (4%) polling stations.

Though Northern Region has a little more people than Brong Ahafo and two more constituencies than BA, it has fewer polling stations than BA, 2001 as compared to 2,382. This means that 10,005 delegates from the Northern Region and 11,910 from BA would take part in nominating the next NPP flagbearer.

This is not unfair because all the delegates are NPP members. Essentially, for the presidential election, there is only one constituency. So the popularity of a party’s candidate across constituencies is important.

Overall, there are 21,034 polling stations in the country which translates into 105,170 polling station officers as delegates. Anybody who questions the expansion exercise must be questioned why. Surely a greater sampling of a presidential candidates popularity is better than a smaller sampling of that popularity.

The NPP knew that some constituencies and polling stations had more voters than others yet it chose to have 5 polling station officers per every polling station. It would rather be unfair to discriminate against some of these foot soldiers when it comes to choosing a Presidential Candidate on the basis of voter population.