General News of Monday, 14 December 2020
Source: diplomaticaffairstv.com
A Former Liberian President and leader of the ECOWAS Election observer mission to Ghana, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has described the 2020 presidential and parliamentary Elections as peaceful and transparent.
The main opposition National Democratic Congress had described last Monday’s polls which gave the governing NPP a victory of 51.302% of the total ballots cast as the real “stolen verdict” in favour of President Akufo Addo who is also being accused of using the military to intimidate voters. However, while giving her assessment of the just-ended polls in a Television interview with Harriet Nartey on Diplomatic Affairs program on Saturday, December 12, 2020, Johnson Sirleaf noted that “If you ask me I would have to say once again Ghana has shown an example of an election that’s peaceful, that’s free, that’s transparent, that’s credible”.
She added that “Is something that is exemplary. I wish we had a way for many other countries to learn of this process and see how they might improve upon their own system to be able to adapt some of these extra measures”.
The Nobel Peace laureate also applauded the people of Ghana and the electoral Commission for executing their duties and responsibilities in a peaceful desirable manner. “It’s because they have the mindset that we want peaceful elections we want to cast the vote in manner that will demonstrate the adherence to legal means, the adherence to the protocols that have been established” she said.
The statement by the foreign observer joins a similar position of the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) which has asked Ghanaians to give confidence to the Presidential Election results declared by the Electoral Commission as it reflects accurately how citizens voted on December 7, 2020 after the group said it monitored the election by deploying 1,502 Parallel Voter Tabulation (PVT) Observers across the 275 constituencies in the country’s 16 regions.The estimates presented by the PVT according to CODEO closely matched the EC’s official results, falling within a 95% confidence range and the associated margin of error.