#Ghanavotes: Akufo-Addo in narrow early lead

President Nana Akufo Addo is maintaining a narrow lead in the results that have so far been collated after voting in Ghana’s presidential election ended on Monday.

As of 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, the results of 58 out of 275 constituencies have been collated. Mr Akufo-Addo, who is contesting on the platform of the New Patriotic Party, has polled 1,189,245 (54.2 per cent) while his closest challenger, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress, has received 972,985 (44.4%) . The winner is expected to poll over 50 per cent votes after the final collation.

After the collation at the constituencies, the results will move to the regions – 16 in number – and then the final results will be sent to the electoral commission in Accra.

The election was generally peaceful across the country, but there were few incidents of violence. There were also cases of misinformation circulating on social media, including a claim that the ballot papers had been designed to make Mr Mahama lose votes, a claim found to be misleading by Dubawa, a fact-checking platform.

According to the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), 235 incidents were recorded across the 4,000 polling stations it monitored. The incidents include harassment and intimidation (43 cases), violation of COVID-19 health and safety protocols (40), unauthorised persons at polling stations (24), and malfunction of biometric verification devices (21).

The others are the suspension of voting (16), non-opening of polling stations (9), polling stations running out of material (8), violation of voting or counting procedures (6), stealing or destruction of election material (4), voter disenfranchisement (4), vote-buying (4), ineligible persons allowed to vote (2), and ballot stuffing and over-voting (2).

In the statement, which was issued by Albert Arhin, CODEO’s national coordinator, the regions where some of the incidents took place are the North East, Greater Accra, Savannah, Central, Eastern, Ahafo, and Ashanti.