The Youth Parliament in the Ayawaso Central Municipality in the Greater Accra Region has urged the Electoral Commission (EC) to initiate strict measures to help prevent overcrowding and chaos at the polling stations in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic scare.

It suggested a live broadcast of the counting of the ballot papers during the December 7, 2020 elections.

The Parliamentarians, who are the youth representatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the municipality made the suggestion at their second sitting.

They spoke on the motion, ‘The General Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Upcoming 2020 Elections and the Economy of Ghana’.

According to them, the country is not in normal times and the old methods of political activities would not be the same hence the need for the adoption of proactive measures to protect the voter from contracting and spreading the virus.

“The country does not have an electronic voting system as such still uses the manual voting processes which can endanger people’s lives, it behooves the Commission to devise trusted means to ensure the safety of their officials and the voter population,” they stressed.

The parliamentarians observed that since the elections cannot be postponed there was the need for the observation of standard protocols to keep party supporters and members at bay by a live broadcast to enable them to view from home instead of crowding at the polling stations and at times foment trouble.

They urged the political parties to recruit and train highly educated people as polling station agents to give their members confidence that final results would be declared in an atmosphere of transparency, credibility and fairness.

The Majority Leader, Chris Kouyo urged the electorate to vote massively for President Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP for another four-year term while the Minority Leader, Caleb Tettey, for his part, appealed to the electorate to give the NDC Presidential candidate John Mahama another chance.

The Speaker of the House, Conqueror Korto, commended both sides of the House for a fruitful debate and tasked the parliamentarians to extend their messages to the youth in the municipality.