There is no certain winner yet in Ghana's presidential election even though incumbent President John Dramani Mahama is thought to be in the lead.
After three days of what has been touted as a keen contest, several media outlets have the president at a little over 50 per cent of votes in provisional results reported so far, while main challenger Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party is credited with about 48 per cent with a sizeable number of votes still outstanding.
The national constitution stipulates that a clear winner must obtain more than 50 per cent of valid votes cast in the national race, failure of which will push the election into a run-off between the two leading contestants.
Eight candidates are contesting the race.
The Multimedia Group has reported results from 253 constituencies in the presidential race with John Mahama polling 5,032,002 votes or 50.39 per cent and Nana Addo polling 4,797,297 votes or 48.4 votes. Results are expected in 22 outstanding constituencies, seven of which are in the Greater Accra region, five from the Northern region, four from the Brong Ahafo region, three from the Central region and one each from the Eastern, Upper East and Upper West regions. About 1.3 million voters are expected to vote in the outstanding constituencies with turnout generally at 81 percent.
On the parliamentary front the ruling party has 123 seats out of 233 constituency results reported so far, with the NPP at 107 seats and the People's National Convention's Alhassan Azong grabbing the party's only seat (Builsa Constituency) while three seats have gone to independent Candidates.
The process has stretched this far as a result of the breakdown of biometric data verification equipment in a number of polling stations on the first day of voting on Friday.
via African Elections Project (Accra)