Acting Director of Elections for the National Democratic Congress, Bede Ziedeng, has revealed that the party is making plans to collate 2020 election results electronically.
According to him, this will afford the NDC the opportunity to gather first hand information on the collation of the results.
There had been reports that the NDC could not collate its own results in the 2016 Presidential and Parliamentary elections so as to compare with that of the Electoral Commission.
The move is said to have crippled the NDC’s effort to know how then incumbent President John Mahama was faring in the polls.
But speaking on Okay FM’s Ade Akye Abia programme, he explained that the party resorted to manual collation during the 2016 elections, which did not help.
"Though there were plans to electronically collate the results, our system crushed and that we could not do the electronic collating . . . That does not mean we did not collate our results," he added.
He indicated that they have all their collated results which indeed is helping them to access the shortfall, as they prepare for elections 2020.
"But, like the NPP, we are putting in measures to have to use the best technology to have the 2020 election results collated," he added.
Contrary to earlier reports that the NDC failed to collate its 2016 election results, it has emerged that the largest opposition party employed the services of a private institution to collate results of the 2016 general elections to the detriment of party structures.
According to NDC’s Acting Director of Elections, Bede Ziedeng the results that was collated by the system used by the private company crushed compelling the party to revert to the manual system which didn’t really help matters.
Speaking at a press conference in Accra on Thursday, Mr Ziedeng denied claims that the NDC did not collate the 2016 results.
“Unfortunately, it was this infrastructure which crushed soon after it was deployed therefore failed to provide any result for the party and this was alluded to by the Prof. Kwesi Botchwey Committee report. But that does not mean that no results were collated, eventually the party had to fall on the National Election Directorate for the collation of the results.
“On 8th December 2016, the late former Vice President Amissah Arthur sent for the collated results from the election directorate, the collated results of 115 constituencies which was ready by then were delivered to him by the directorate.”
Mr Mahama, then flag bearer of the NDC, lost by more than 9% of total votes to the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo.
Akufo-Addo obtained a staggering 5,716,609 of total votes cast in the 2016 elections, representing 53.84%, to snatch the Presidency from John Mahama, who secured 4,713,277 votes (44.40%).
<<Print>>