Democracy News

Ghana to Hold Presidential Runoff Election; Monitors Praise First Round of Elections
By Daniel Hollingsworth
December 10, 2008 | Printer Friendly

Neither major candidate was able to secure an outright majority in Ghana’s December 7 presidential election, and a runoff has been scheduled for December 28, according to a report from the Associated Press.  The incumbent New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, received 49.1 percent of the 8.6 million votes, with John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) receiving 47.9 percent.

International election monitors hailed the conduct of the elections as free and fair despite isolated reports of violence at some polling stations.  John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official leading a delegation from the Carter Center, told the AP, “This is an electoral process that is as transparent as any the Carter Center has seen of the 72 elections it has observed.”  The delegation from the European Union offered similar praise, saying that “polling was conducted in a calm and generally orderly manner…EU observers assessed the overall environment positively.”

Reuters writes that “Ghana's fifth set of elections since embracing multiparty democracy in 1992 [drew] attention as a chance to prove an African state can hold credible ballots, after election-related violence this year in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.”  Current president John Kufour will stand down in January after serving the maximum of two four-year terms, and seven candidates ran in the first round to be his successor.  The Wall Street Journal writes that Ghanaians made special efforts to ensure that the vote was accurate: “A coalition of Ghanaians…used a method known as parallel-vote tabulation to make an independent count of the vote. Volunteers, dispatched to a random sample of over 1,000 polling stations, zapped the local tallies by text message to a central computer database. The computer program then estimates the election results. On Wednesday, the group confirmed in a statement that the official result was an ‘accurate reflection of how Ghanaians voted.’”

References:

Associated Press: Heated presidential race goes to runoff in Ghana

Reuters: Akufo-Addo leads Ghana poll, run-off seen likely

Wall Street Journal: Ghana Presidential Candidates Fall Short of Majority