Ghanaian voters returned to the polls on Sunday in a run-off declared by the Electoral Commission to elect a new president, following the deadlock of the Dec. 7 elections.
Some 12.5 million people are eligible to cast ballots in the polls which close at 5:00 p.m. (1700 GMT). The polls were closely watched by international observers and voting at most stations proceeded peacefully throughout Sunday.
The second round race is between Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and John Evans Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Lagos-based newspaper This Day reported.
Chairman of the Electoral Commission Kwadwo Afari Gyan announced on Dec. 10 that neither Akufo-Addo nor Mills obtained the required 50 percent of votes needed for an outright win.
In the first round of election, Akufo-Addo secured 4,159,439 votes, or 49.13 percent of the total valid counts, while Mills gained 4,056,634 votes, or 47.92 percent. Ghana recorded a nationwide voter population of 12,472,758 for the 2008 elections and turnout was 69.52 percent in the first round.
A total of eight candidates were involved in the presidential race. Paa Kwesi Nduom of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) came third with some 1.34 percent of the votes, while the rest five contenders garnered even smaller shares during the Dec.7 vote.
Meanwhile, in the parliamentary election held together with the presidential vote on Dec. 7, the NDC overtook the NPP to become the largest party in parliament after it swept 114 seats out of the total 230. The NPP lost 19 seats, all to the NDC, and finished with 107 seats.
According to the Electoral Commission, the candidate who wins the majority votes in the run-off election would be declared Ghana's president-elect. This would be the second time in Ghana's 51-year history that a democratically elected president would handover power to another.
Voting on Dec.7 was generally peaceful, with only isolated cases of skirmishes appearing in news reports. First round results came out within people's expectations, as the top finishers Akufo-Addo and Mills are both influential politicians in the country.
Akufo-Addo and Mills are both seen to have acquired enough experiences to lead Ghana's emerging economy, and lead a nation which will soon join the club of oil producing countries of the world.
Akufo-Addo was one of the founding members of the NPP in 1992. Under the administration of John Kufour, the outgoing president, he was the attorney-general and minister of justice from 2001 to 2003. He later became minister of foreign affairs from April 2003 to July 2003. He then resigned in accordance with his party's constitutional provision to seek the presidential nomination of the NPP.
He was elected as the NPP's presidential flag-bearer on Dec. 23,2007 at a party congress where he won 47.96 percent of the valid votes. Although he fell short of the required 50 percent, John Alan Kyerema-nten, the second placed candidate, conceded and supported Akufo-Addo for the candidacy.
For Atta Mills, the 2008 presidential election is the third time he has run as the presidential candidate of the NDC in a row.
He had twice run unsuccessfully for the presidency. He is believed to be well respected in Ghana because of his pedigree. He entered the political arena after a fulfilled career in the academics as a law lecturer at the University of Ghana. In 1988, Mills became the acting commissioner of Internal Revenue Service of Ghana and was named commissioner in 1996.
He was sworn in as vice-president of Ghana on Jan. 7, 1997. First elected by his party as its presidential flag bearer in December 2002, Mills also led the party to the 2004 elections.
Source:Xinhua
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