CODEO Goes Mute After EC Changed Parallel Election Results Six Times

The Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) has found itself in a credibility crisis after the election result figures that it backed the Electoral Commission (EC) over, mutated at least six times.

The organization which used to have a lot of respect is now dodging phone calls over the exposure that it may not have done an independent results collation, but, like the Electoral Commission and the media, depended on the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) for election results.

Several attempts by Whatsup News to get CODEO to explain its position once more after the EC had changed its election results have failed.

It would be recalled that following the declaration of President Akufo-Addo as President-elect by the EC Chairperson, Jean Mensah, last week Wednesday, the NDC had quickly protested the EC’s figures as wrong. CODEO had jumped to the defense of the EC.

Acting Chairman of CODEO, Sheikh Armiyawu Shaibu had argued passionately in the corner of the EC saying that the results that the EC used to declare Akufo-Addo as winner were the same as the results that CODEO had independently collated. 

Soon after this, however, the public realized that a tally of the various percentages allotted to the various candidates amounted to some 100.3%. 

When the EC realized this, it quickly issued a statement saying it had made a mistake with the total number of votes cast and changed it, saying the percentages allotted remained correct. But the public soon found out that the percentages now tallied up to 100.8%.

Then the EC started changing the figures and percentages on its website. As part of the changes, over 10,000 votes were deducted from the votes that the EC had earlier declared for Akufo-Addo, even though voting had ended.

Ghana’s EC has since seriously lost credibility with the NDC making it clear that it is not accepting the election results which do not tally with what it collated. WhatsUp News had been trying to get CODEO to update this paper on the status of its own result numbers, given that it had passionately defended the EC’s own, but CODEO has not been available.

At the time of calling its office, its lines were down.