Ghana: Nation Heads for Presidential Runoff Election

10 December 2008
allAfrica.com

Ghana will hold a second round of presidential elections on December 28 after neither of the principal candidates secured more than 50 percent of the vote.

This was announced on Wednesday by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Ghana.

The two candidates in the run-off will be Nana Akufo-Addo, the candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) of President John Kufuor, and John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) of former ruler Jerry Rawlings.

A gap of only 102,000 votes separated the two candidates in an election in which eight million people voted.

Afari-Gyan announced the outcome of Sunday's presidential polls to hundreds of journalists and political party representatives at the commission's national headquarters.

The African Elections Project in Accra reported that certified results from 229 constituencies showed that Akufo-Addo had won 4,159,439 votes, representing 49.13 percent of votes cast, and Atta Mills had received 4,056,634 votes (47.92 percent).

The other six candidates pulled fewer than 10 percent of the vote, the project reported. The percentage poll was 67.9 percent.

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