Chapter 8 The 1996 elections saw an increased impact of observers' activities on the democratic process in the country. The involvement of domestic observers in this election was remarkable. Two important domestic observer groups emerged on the political scene – one led by Joseph Kingsley-Nyinah, a former Appeals Court Judge and chairman of the Electoral Commission, was called the Network of Domestic Election Observers(NEDEO) and the other was Ghana Alert, led by Ben Ephson, a veteran journalist. These two bodies, together with other domestic poll-watching groups such as the Ghana Commission on Human Right and Administrative Justice(CHRAJ) and the Institute of Economic Affairs(IEA) observed the elections. Unlike the 1992 elections, local observers were adequately prepared to better observe the elections than even the external observers from the COG, European Union(EU), National Democratic Institute(NDI), United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) and the OAU. For the first time and in marked contrast to the 1992 elections, the election outcome was accepted by all observers and the political parties as being transparently'free and fair'(Ayee, 1996; Gyimah-Boadi, 1997; Jeffries, 1998). The elections in 2000 were witnessed by external observers from the OAU, Canada, United States and Britain. This time, there were even more local observer groups, including Ghana Alert, Forum 109 for Religious Bodies and CODEO(Gadzekpo, 2001). At the end of the elections, despite reported cases of malpractices and abuse of incumbency through alleged misuse of state resources, both domestic and foreign election observers pronounced the outcome of the elections as being relatively'free, fair and transparent'(Smith, 2002). 109 CODEO, which co-opted some members of the moribund NEDEO of 1996, was formed in 2000 under the auspices of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development(CDD-Ghana). 248