Election 2020: Electoral Commission must be commended - Statistician

Senior lecturer at University of Ghana, Department of Statistics, Dr. Louis Asiedu, has said that the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana must be applauded for conducting what he describes as a “purely transparent election”.

On December 7th, 2020, Ghanaians went to the polls to elect a president and members of parliaments after which the Electoral Commission declared the results on Wednesday, December 9th.

Speaking on the role of the EC in this year’s election, Dr. Louis Asiedu told Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show : “From where I sit, coming from democratic elections we have gone through, this is by far one of the best if not the best elections in Ghana. Transparency was at its peak. You could see that the Electoral Commission was in touch with the people trying to explain and give reasons for some of the allegations raised, clarifying issues and contacting the media. If you look at the way they placed the electoral roll on their website, every Ghanaian at any point in time saw the centres they were going to vote at.

And as far as the collation was concerned, we saw her [Jean Mensa] say that in every regional results she certified, it was a unanimous decision between the parties. So the fact is the representatives of the party certified the results”.

Dr. Asiedu furthered that while there were some unfortunate incidents, these were to be expected. “So this is a very transparent process even though there were scattered isolated issues across the nation. We saw some few issues but we cannot get an incident-free election. There will be some cases. But the fact is that we will want such cases to become minimum just so it does not frustrate the gains we have made in the election”.

He reiterated his stance on the good work of the EC by stating, “This is a purely transparent election and Ghanaians have done very well. We need to praise the EC and commend them for the good work they have done”.

The Electoral Commission of Ghana officially declared President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as the winner of the 2020 general election.

The declaration made by the EC Chair, Jean Mensa, indicated that President Akufo-Addo at the end of the polls had 6,730,413 representing 51.595% while his main contender John Mahama of the NDC had 6,214,889 representing 47.366%.

The Electoral Commission is the official body mandated to conduct elections in Ghana