Friday, 7 December 2012, Ghanaians across the country will go to the polls to elect a President and 275 Members of Parliament for their respective constituencies. For political parties, Friday is the day they have spent sleepless nights in cars and buses nationwide campaigning for votes. For Ghana Decides, Friday climaxes months of community engagements in Bole and Abeadzi, Tweet ups and Facebook chats in Accra and Cape Coast, blog posts written at midnight in Damongo and Sunyani.

Ghana Decides is a social media and elections project by Blogging Ghana, a membership-based organisation of Ghanaian bloggers. The non-partisan project is supported by STAR-Ghana, with funding from DFID, DANIDA, EU and USAID. Ghana Decides aims to cover the elections and its related activities. Since January 2012, the project has run several online campaign on the elections, as well as offline social media training for civil society organisations, youth groups, political parties, public institutions and have held numerous community engagements.

On Election Day, Ghana Decides will place volunteers strategically across the country to gather information on the process and relay to our Election Centre at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, where we are fired up with sponsored internet bandwidth from ECOBAND. The information relayed will be shared on our online platforms at GhanaDecides.com, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Flicker.

We will share with our online audience accurate facts and infographics from previous elections, the processes involved in the 2012 elections, the progress of voting from polling stations, the thoughts and impressions of those who have voted, as well us stories from young Ghanaians voting for the first time.

Our partnerships with election bodies such as the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers, the Ghana Journalist Association, VOICE Ghana, the online election tool Vote Kast among others places our online platforms in a unique position as a melting pot to gather information, pictures and videos. We hope to share these minute-by-minute details with Ghanaians.

Ghana Decides will host Election Day Google+ Hangouts throughout the entire during of voting and we expect to be joined online by Ghanaians across the country, as we engage ourselves on the process.

We wish to say that Ghana has conducted activities well and peacefully. It is our hope at Ghana Decides that you go out there and vote; that you take along a friend, a sister, a boyfriend, a wife, a neighbour; that you vote, go to your homes and return after 5PM if you wish. Let Ghana be the victor. Our Vote is Our Voice. Let’s Vote!