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There is no doubt elections in Ghana are won by popular votes and so the more votes a candidate gets, the more he/she is likely to win. As an avid follower of elections particularly in Ghana, my curiosity was aroused by recent activities, efforts and claims by the executives of the NDC in the Ashanti Region to amass one million votes for President Mahama from the region in the 2016 election.

Their argument is based on the premise that in 2008, they got over 400,000 for the NDC. In 2012 the NDC garnered over 600,000. And so adding the two numbers, they are bent on amassing a hugely 1million votes for John Mahama (His Excellency).

This position was reiterated by leaders of the recently organized OYA demo/march in support of President Mahama.

This got me more interested and landed into the archives of the gazetted results declared by the EC for some quick analysis.
"Figures don't lie". You can ask Jake Obetsebi Lamptey what that means.

THE FACTS & FIGURES:
The amount of votes each candidate gets in the elections is largely dependent on two things - Total Registered Voters (TRV) and Turn-Out (TOR) on the day of elections.

In the 2000 Election, the Ashanti Region had TRV of 1,976,959 which represents a 24.11% jump from 1,592,854 in the 1996 election with turnout in the region falling from 79.74% to 65.67%. During the same period, the NDC's votes recorded a significant 32.46% fall from 412,474 votes (32.79% of Total Valid Votes - TVV) in 1996 to 278,567 (21.69% of TVV) in the 2000 elections.

In the 2004 elections, TRV in the Ashanti Region went down marginally by 4.22% to 1,893,527. And with a TVV of 1,655,760 and turnout of 88.71%, the NDC recorded a huge 43% increase in its votes to 398,362 - representing 24.06%.

Moving on to the 2008 election, there was over 22% increase in TRV in the Ashanti Region from 1,893,527 in 2004 to 2,317,686 in 2008. This was accompanied by a little over 15% reduction in turnout from 88.71% to 73.58% and TVV increasing just 1.30% marginally to 1,677,285 within the same period.

Out of that TVV, the NDC had 438,234 votes representing 26.13% in the Ashanti Region. That increase is 10% over its 2004 votes in Ashanti.
Finally in 2012, TRV in Ashanti Region again increased by some 10.33% to 2,577,122 whiles TVV and turnout rates also increased by 28.83% and 16.40% respectively to 2,160,920 and 85.65% respectively.

The NDC benefited from this huge turnout by increasing their votes from 438,234 in 2008 to 612,616 in 2012 - an almost 40% jump, which gave them 28.35% share of the Ashanti votes in 2012.

ANALYSES & PROJECTIONS
With the aforementioned facts and figures, it is clear that the NDC has consistently since 2000 elections increased its share of Ashanti votes. That is, 21.59% in 2000, 24.06% in 2004, 26.13% in 2008 and 28.35% in 2012. This gives an average increase of about 9.34% every subsequent election.

Which means that the NDC is more likely to increase its share of Ashanti Region votes again in 2016 and this has been estimated to be 31.0% of Valid Votes.

With the rate at which Total Registered Voters is growing, it has also been estimated that it will increase by some 23.26% from the 2012 figure to 3,151,841 in 2016. This will also be accompanied by an estimated 70.81% turnout and a Total Valid Vote of 2,197,400.

If NDC is estimated to take 31.0% share of this figure that will translate to 681,161 in votes for the NDC which will be just some 11.19% jump over the 2012 figure and will fall short of the "ONE MILLION ASHANTI VOTES FOR MAHAMA IN 2016" by a whopping 318,839 votes.

CONCLUSION
Now if as per the growth rate of TRV and TVV, the NDC is taking 1,000,000 votes from the Ashanti Region that would mean taking about 45.5% share of Ashanti votes. That will be a very huge jump of over 17% from the 28.35% they got in 2012.

There are two reasons why this 17% jump is not possible.
One, statistically, this is only possible if the Ashanti Region has a Total Registered Voters in excess of 5.5 million or it has a voter turnout of over 139% in 2016. Besides, the NDC was only able to achieve 6.67% increment over 12 years (2000-2012), how are they going to achieve a 17% jump just in 4 years (2012-2016)???

Two, this is practically impossible given the fact that Ashanti Region has been the strongest hold of the opposition NPP since the beginning of this fourth republic

By: Justice Monakk - 0233630924